The New YorkerModify

Your novella “The Ice-Skater” tells the story of two Indian laborers who travel to Dubai for work and become friends. You include a wealth of detail about the life of a migrant worker in Dubai. What inspired you to write the story, and how did you go about researching it?

I lived in Dubai as a child and took ice-skating lessons there. I was so terrible at it that the instructor actually recommended to my mother that I give it up. I’d repressed this, naturally, until I went skating again as an adult in late 2022. I was still terrible, but my then partner was an excellent skater, and I loved watching him zip around the rink. Around the same time, the FIFA World Cup was being held in Qatar. I began to see stories in the news about the many laborers who’d died in the Gulf while working on infrastructure projects ramping up to the World Cup. The causes of death spanned from heatstroke to suicide. From there, I began to imagine two lives, two men—one who spent his time in the cold and the other in the heat. For research, I watched investigative documentaries and videos on YouTube that had been uploaded by men who lived in worker accommodations. I read whatever I could find about illegal recruitment fees and the other labor-related binds that migrant workers often find themselves in. I also went skating a few more times, with a friend who very kindly held my hand as we made our rounds. I often write stories in a burst, all at once, but this story came slowly, line by line.

The two men meet different fates, not so much thanks to luck but because one man has a greater awareness of the risks of the job and knows what to ask in advance. The narrative addresses the idea of predestination and, in a way, debunks it. Was that part of your plan for it from the beginning?

I can see where the next paragraph will go only when I’m standing on the precipice of it. So, no, I didn’t have much of a plan when I started, though I was drawn to the image of an inexperienced skater holding on to the side barrier of a rink and watching, mesmerized, as an experienced skater speeds across the ice. I was writing toward that scene, which, now that I’m thinking about it, might itself have the motif of two different fates: mobility and stasis, confidence and shame. I had also been reading Anne Carson’s translations of Euripides’ tragedies at the time. There is a line from “Herakles” that still haunts me: “In an instant, luck changes. / In an instant, children die.” I say this to point out all the ingredients on the counter.

Though the men are both manual laborers, they come from different circumstances. Yogan is from outside Lucknow, in northern India, and has a more provincial background; Samar, who is more worldly, is from Mumbai, to the south. Do those distinctions hold or become irrelevant once they reach Dubai?

I have always felt that distinctions between people from the same country fade when they come to a new place. What you have in common, as outsiders, is greater than what initially set you apart. What Yogan and Samar recognize in each other early on is a desire to better the conditions of the women they love, their families. They’re men in their twenties, just stepping into a new stage of life. They’re excited to talk about their wives, their dreams, their clothes! That is so much more interesting to them in that moment of meeting than where they’ve come from.

Yogan and Samar and their roommates arrive in Dubai with a limited sense of what awaits them, much of it gleaned from vloggers online. Their visions of their lives and their potential futures seem to draw more on what they’ve seen in Bollywood movies, which are a driving force in the story. Does Bollywood have that degree of influence?

Oh, yes! I am thinking particularly about the slate of films that came out in the late nineties and early two-thousands. The Bollywood dimension of this story took me by surprise, since I was never a film person and used to feel embarrassed by the big musical numbers, which were always about two people finally coming together in a large, familial display of affection and acceptance. I used to watch these movies with my parents, and something about their overly chaste rituals of romance felt even more suggestive to me than an onscreen kiss would have. I suppose I also didn’t want my parents to know how much I actually enjoyed watching these saccharine love stories! Which is to say that these films got into my bloodstream despite my resistance. In writing Yogan and Samar, who are both so earnest, I began to wonder how their lives would be different if, unlike me, they’d wholeheartedly embraced these films and their sentimentality, taking cues from the screen heroes to fuel their own courage and ambition and courtships. Where else do we learn what our lives could look like if not from movies (and books, of course)?

This is very rich territory for fiction. Did you consider writing a novel-length version of this story, or was it always intended as a short-form piece?

I think it was always going to be a story, though I definitely worried when it seemed to keep getting longer.

You have been working on your first novel. Does it relate in any way to “The Ice-Skater”? How challenging was it to make the leap from writing short fiction to a book-length narrative?

My novel, which I’ve just finished, unfolds over a few days in an apartment in Mumbai where two women—a college student and her childhood nanny—meet again after many years apart. The novel explores the strange, intimate relationship between them, a complicated kind of love; their bond is almost like that of a mother and daughter, but in a much more latent way. The book is divided into two parts, one told from the perspective of the student and one from the perspective of the former nanny. In order to make writing the novel seem less daunting to myself, I thought of it as two novellas side-by-side. Having the narrative take place within a limited time frame helped with that, too. After having written stories for so long, I’m still getting used to the roominess of a novel, how both characters and author have so much space in which to breathe. As I work on edits, I catch myself jumping through time the way I would in a story, in a single clause or with a line break, and then I realize that I can slow down, I can show the weather changing—such luxury! The substance of the novel is very different from “The Ice-Skater,” but I can see that it engages with similar ideas about immigration and what we might owe to those we’ve left behind in our home countries. ♦

They were young men when they first met. Both of them in skinny jeans and American-branded T-shirts, purchased at a greater cost than either would have admitted to his family. Samar’s T-shirt read “GUESS?,” and Yogan’s “American Eagle.” The meaning of these inscriptions did not matter to them, though Yogan suspected that his had something to do with the American postal service, and this excited him. Samar’s T-shirt was tight around his chest in a film-hero kind of way, the polyester adhering to the curves of his boyish biceps, and he later admitted to Yogan that this elasticity, rather than the English word on his chest, was what had convinced him to make the purchase.

It was the T-shirts that had sparked their first conversation, each asking the other, “Do you speak English?” English was necessary in order to navigate the airport, and, they expected, life in this new city called Dubai, which was in so many ways an imitation of a major Western city. But English had come to both men only piecemeal, from the dazzling, incongruous lines in Bollywood films. The plots of those movies and their many twists had vanished; what Yogan and Samar recalled was Shah Rukh Khan, with his signature wide-eyed look, ordering Kajol to “take a chill pill!” And Kajol, mocking her hoity-toity London neighbors with “Would you like some tea?” Thanks to a joint effort drawing on both men’s vocabularies, they made it through immigration and baggage claim and out to the arrivals hall, where a red-haired woman with a laminated sign motioned for them to wait for the shuttle that would take them to their accommodations.

Only a few months earlier, Yogan’s wife had sent him out to look for more long-term work. His last construction contract had recently ended, and Roshni had suddenly vomited a hot stream of bile onto her bare feet after her morning tea. That afternoon, a drug-store test had informed them that she was pregnant with their second child. And so Yogan had been sternly dispatched to pass under a sign that read “KISMAT JOB AGENCY,” and into a roadside shop that smelled of a sporty, masculine cologne. Inside, another banner in lowercase English script read “quick overseas enquiry all welcome.”

Overseas, quick: the words themselves had a certain voltage.

The shop had a running air-conditioner, pristine white walls, and a statuette of Lord Ganesh attached to the plastic desk with a hardened dollop of liquid glue. Behind the screen of a laptop was a heavyset man, sitting as still as an oracle.

“Your name, your date of birth, your phone number,” the man said. He wore a thick gold chain over his collared shirt and repeatedly clicked one of two buttons on his wired mouse. Once Yogan had delivered the requested information, the man licked his index finger and handed him a sheet of paper setting out the conditions of his potential employment. The compensation, converted to rupees, was more than triple what he had made on his last contract.

“This is the only job I have available at the moment. You’ll go abroad?” the man asked.

Thanks to local gossip, Yogan already thought of the man as someone he needed to impress. He had worn his American Eagle T-shirt to the appointment. But the possibility of this new future made him aware of his own timidity. “What is it like over there, uncle?” he asked.

“Big, big buildings,” the man said, not once looking up from the screen of his computer. “And the roads are clean. Food and all is expensive, of course, but the quality is much better. Everything is imported, no? You’ll see, beta.”

It relaxed Yogan to be called “son.” He wondered if delivering this word, so affectionately, was part of the man’s training. But he felt disarmed enough to hint at his other question, which had been weighing on his mind since Roshni had broached the idea of his working in Dubai.

“My wife is expecting, uncle. Our second. We have one girl. I thought I should tell you that. I’ve heard the stories, you know.”

“What stories?” the man asked. Now he looked up from his computer and caught Yogan’s eye. No longer fatherly, Yogan thought, but shrewd, gruff.

“These men who hire us—I’ve heard they might arrange things so we can’t come back.”

“Rubbish!” the man said. Small, yellowish teeth appeared under the heft of his mustache; he was silently laughing. “If they did all that nonsense, then why would I have so many applications to process, hmm?” He pointed at a towering stack of folders behind him.

“Times have changed,” the man added. “Those stories are old. Bygone.”

Relieved, Yogan filled out his application and waited, over the next few weeks, for his phone to ring.

It had all happened differently for Samar.

Samar was from Mumbai, itself a big city, one that Yogan had always imagined as a sparkling place, the backdrop of his favorite movies, where A-list actors could be spotted sauntering through bazaars with their big sunglasses and hotheaded bodyguards. Samar wouldn’t have been as easily swayed by the hum of a working laptop and unstained white paint, Yogan guessed, for his new friend had laughed in a slightly superior way at these details of Yogan’s story.

“So why did you come then?” Yogan asked.

Sitting against a concrete wall outside the airport, using his duffel as a backrest, Samar told the story of the time he was hired to install a stripper pole in a Bollywood heroine’s Pali Hill flat. “The work order listed it as exercise equipment,” Samar said, “but I’ve seen enough movies. I know what people do with something like that.”

The actress was not there at the time of the installation, Samar said, but her home was decorated more extravagantly than he could have imagined. There, he saw furniture that he hadn’t known existed beyond film sets. A circular mattress, a crystal chandelier, lavender carpeting throughout. Samar had looked around not with envy, he said, but with reverence. The pole was to be installed in a third bedroom, which was also a dressing room, or so he guessed from the light bulbs around the mirrors and the many racks of frilly clothes. Later, in the chawl where he shared a single matchbox room with his wife, Samar began compulsively picturing the actress moving through her flat as he moved through his own. As he refilled the water drum at the communal taps for their morning tea, Samar imagined the actress draping her shoulders with the impossibly soft shawl that had been flung over the sofa, before dropping a tea bag into one of her many porcelain cups. In a moment of contemplation, she might hold the cup against her chest for warmth, he thought, for her air-conditioner would be rattling fiercely, set to a temperature of seventeen degrees Celsius.

“Seventeen degrees!” Samar said, bringing his hands together to clap at the number. “We were sweating and shivering at the same time as we worked!”

Yogan listened to his new friend with a dignified silence. He had never known anyone who had seen a stripper pole in person before. “Wow,” he said.

Samar appeared relieved to have told someone. He’d had to keep all this a secret, he admitted. He was newly married to a woman named Chanda, and it had been enough of a scandal that they’d met in a park and not through a relative’s introduction. The story of the actress’s apartment would have infuriated Chanda’s brothers, who had never liked Samar and, he predicted, would never try to.

It had been difficult not to talk to his wife about that day, how it had changed the way he looked at his life, Samar continued. The next morning, he had shaved his head to a greenish stubble in front of the bathroom mirror—a way of taking fewer trips to the barber. When Chanda saw him, her first reaction had been to howl for help. In their dimly lit room, she’d thought him a stranger. When she’d finally accepted that it was him, she placed her hands on his shoulders, his neck, the base of his skull, and, finally, his prickly scalp, which Samar rubbed now, sitting outside the airport. He wondered aloud if Chanda had been able to tell that there were desires in him that hadn’t been there before, if she had worried about what this could mean for her own life.

“I came home and really saw everything,” Samar said. “I saw where we lived, and it hurt me to see so clearly.”

What did he see? Cracks in the walls, rat pellets in the cupboard, a sudsy creep of water under the door, because the aunties outside were forever washing their saris and utensils. For once he was bothered by the many abuses that the warring grandfathers who lived above them hurled at each other through the night.

Chanda had unrolled her thin bedding on the floor, to sleep. Her long braid, tossed behind her when she turned, was held at the end with a knot made of her own hair. For months, Samar had heard her complain about her hips and knees, tender after her days of squatting in rich people’s flats with a wet rag, wiping their marble floors from end to end. He had always dismissed these aches as inevitabilities of their lot, but now he felt his wife’s pain under his own skin.

Samar had expected this new clarity to pass, the way drunken bouts of insight and sadness often did, but visions of the actress’s apartment continued to follow him. Nights when he got home, he could hear her blowing air-conditioner. He could see her silky two-piece pajamas, hanging from a crystal hook in the bathroom. Samar understood that Chanda and the actress were two women separated by money and luck. He had control over one of those things; he could find better paying work.

Some days later, he told Yogan, he woke up to his heart pounding with impatience, which told him that it was time to find a solution. He went to a recruiting agency down the road and signed a contract that very day. It was still early when he got home. In clouded morning light, he lay on Chanda’s mat with her and told her the news: soon he would start working for a construction company in Dubai.

Sixty or so men had flown in that day from Karachi, Kathmandu, and Mumbai. The red-haired woman appeared again a few hours later to usher them onto the bus that would take them to their camp, about an hour outside the city. But, before that could happen, some men were called by name and asked for their passports. The company needed to process their visas, the woman said, but Yogan already suspected that he’d got himself a different deal than the men obediently lining up before him. Could he, from where he sat, a flutter in his own chest, issue some kind of warning? Yogan silently watched as Samar placed his blue-black booklet into the woman’s outstretched palm.

On the bus, one or two men tried to broach the subject, curious as to whether the others had been made to give up their papers earlier, at immigration or baggage claim. No verdicts had been reached yet, but already the passports were a touchy subject. Those with elderly parents or young children put an end to the discussion: “Brother, if I keep thinking about this, I’ll fall into a depression.”

The bus travelled on roads that were like wide, gray tongues, merging onto highways and underpasses, where the walls were speckled with artful blue mosaics or ads for upcoming appliance sales. Out the window were the glimmering buildings that Yogan was expecting, as tall and confident as rockets, their surfaces engorged by the harsh sun. From time to time, Yogan looked down at his cellphone and reread the messages he’d received from Roshni since he’d landed.

She wanted to know whether he’d arrived safely, if he could send her any pictures. He slipped his phone back into his pocket without responding. Watching the bright, silvery buildings, Yogan wanted to enjoy the solitary bolt of desire that was beginning to course through him. He imagined that this was how Samar must have felt as he walked around the actress’s flat—as if something divine and chemical were taking shape in his body, the birth of a new ambition.

Behind and in front of him, there were conversations about how clean the city was. Not a single crushed bottle of Coke or a billowing plastic bag, just miles and miles of pure asphalt. The men wondered where the poor without homes slept, where the stray dogs with bitten ears and tragic faces prowled.

“Maybe they bring out cleaners at night,” one man suggested. “They must have machines that do it.”

“I’ve heard they make the prisoners do it,” a voice from the back said.

The silver buildings grew smaller and smaller, until they became like motes of dust on the horizon. As the bus turned in to their accommodations, the men’s chatter began to slow. In their silence was the realization that the streets surrounding where they were going to live were as littered as the others had been spotless. Here, it seemed, were all the city’s tossed water bottles and flattened cartons. Rumbles coursed through the bus as the men understood this, one by one.

There were well-circulated rumors about the camps—the unlivable conditions, the filth. White men making documentaries had uploaded clips to YouTube. On his phone, months ago, Yogan had watched one of those men, retching at the smell of the camp bathrooms, fight his way past disgruntled security guards to an open courtyard where he could breathe fresh air. It was an old video, from the early twenty-tens, but it was still the one that had the most views. These days, a new generation of vloggers, armed with hair gel and smartphones, were uploading their own clips detailing their day-to-day lives inside the camps, as a way of encouraging other men to make the move. One vlogger, a man from Kabul, went live on Facebook once a month to counsel other men from the region on how to secure employment in the Gulf. Yogan and Roshni had spent hours, after their daughter was asleep, watching this man’s pixelated face as he walked the halls of his accommodations, answering questions.

Yogan suspected that everyone on the bus had watched the man from Kabul’s videos, and felt, as he had, their plans for another life coming joyously together. Though the man had been careful to temper his viewers’ hopes. Recently, he had begun signing off at the end of each of his videos with a disclaimer: “This is only one humble man’s experience, please remember. God has different plans for each of us.”

As Yogan disembarked from the bus, he recalled the man from Kabul’s warning. The sight of the accommodations heavied his chest. Here were stout buildings of cement, not shimmering glass; men already residing in some of the rooms had fixed yellowing newspapers to the windows, to block out the heat. Others had gathered to watch the slothful procession of newcomers file out of the narrow bus doors and into the courtyard, where fallen wickets lay from an abandoned game of cricket. Yogan leaned into Samar’s shoulder to try to put words to what they were both feeling: “You think we’ll ever see the inside of those nice buildings?”

Samar seemed to eye him with a twinge of anger. “I’m just here to work,” he said.

In the room, they agreed to share a bunk, Samar at the top, Yogan at the bottom. They’d known to expect it, but still, as the door kept opening and closing, and one man after another walked in with suitcases and basmati-rice sacks stuffed with clothing, with burners and steel pots, with statuettes of Krishna and leather-bound Qurans, they grew more and more disheartened, until the last man entered and looked at Yogan’s bottom bunk with entitlement, and Yogan knew to climb up and lie beside his new friend, too exhausted by then to care that their calves and elbows were touching.

In the dark, they looked at each other wordlessly, all the rapture of their stories blunted. The man from Kabul had warned about the number of men assigned to each room. “I won’t lie to you,” he had said. “You’ll be uncomfortable. You’ll have to adjust.” But Yogan had hoped—though he didn’t admit it—that this, too, was a story of bygone times. When Samar began to cry, a mewling, stifled sound, Yogan brought his friend’s head into his chest. He whispered that they’d arrived, not only to a big city but to a new country. They were abroad, and the sun would bring them a new start. He was sure of it.

“Listen, blokes, we’re on a tight schedule, everything is very tight, including my pants and my shirt, and as our time gets tighter we’ll be in tight shit.”

Scattered laughter.

It was late one night, almost a year after they’d arrived. Samar was impersonating his supervisor, a beer-bellied foreigner who, the men had decided, hailed from either Australia or New Zealand. They weren’t sure of his origins, in part owing to his confounding accent, which required him to repeat instructions five different times at five different speeds, but they had eliminated the possibility of England because of the supervisor’s coffee flask, a ceramic blue-lidded thing with the emblem of a crown on its front.

“No British person actually cares about the Queen,” one of the men declared, his legs dangling from his top bunk across the room. “To them, it’s just another loaded family living in a big house, running a family business.”

Samar said, “In one of the houses where Chanda does her cleaning, there’s a glass cabinet under lock and key. Inside there are plates of every size and color, with the Queen’s face on them. They are not for eating, her madam said. They are for dis-play.”

At night, the men usually returned to the accommodations in silence. Most of them worked construction in different sites across the city. Samar’s group, which included a couple of the other men in their shared room, was building a highly anticipated sporting stadium that was already six months behind schedule. This meant that their work was now proceeding at double speed, for there was some kind of televised event nearing, something glamorous and exclusive, that required tickets to be purchased months in advance. Under the new schedule and supervisor, the stadium was expected to open in just a year.

“You come to these places free, and then they put you in chains,” another man said, pursuing his own, separate line of thought.

The others were used to this man’s abrupt, tragic declarations. “Oh, tell Baldy to go write his poems elsewhere!” someone called.

Yogan had heard that the supervisor on Samar’s project had limited the men’s bathroom breaks to once a day. Twelve hours of work, with just one sliver of peace in which to piss. Some men had taken to climbing down to a basement floor, where there was no light, only rubble, to relieve themselves. Their previous shift manager had allowed them to use the bathroom to wash their hands before eating, but the Australian told them to use the water from their bottles to rinse off, and, when those bottles were empty, he said, they would make adequate vessels for holding urine. There was no refilling water bottles during work hours. Men who ran out had to wait until they got home. In just the last week, two men had fainted from heat stroke, and another had coughed up a smear of bloody phlegm.

The men speculated that the heat was making the Australian insane. The high temperatures must have overloaded the synapses of his brain; this was the only possible explanation for his howling and redness and reverence of the Crown.

Yogan listened to all this night after night, shaking his head when a show of disapproval was required. He had yet to encounter any such cruelty in his own working life.

Now Samar said, “You don’t come to places like this already free. You come looking for freedom.”

“Maybe the Australian’s wife left him,” the man with the dangling legs said. “Maybe one day he came home, his skin peeling everywhere, and she said, ‘Enough of this! You think I want to spend my life applying ointment to your red-red nose?’ ”

“Wife! You think a man like that ever had a woman waiting for him at home? Feeding him biryani?”

“Someone is keeping him well fed.”

Laundry was hung on lines across the room, blocking Yogan’s view of some of his friends’ faces. He was lying in his bed beside Samar, freshly bathed. In the next room, the air-conditioner was switched on, and the gentle vibration of it through the wall lulled him closer and closer to sleep.

Hours later, from the darkness of his dreams, Yogan was woken by the sound of cloth snapping against air, a quick, practiced swatting, the kind an overworked mother might deliver to the fat behind of her wailing child. “Shoo!” one of the men was saying, as if to a mosquito. “Go bother someone else.” Others in the room groaned at the noise.

It was difficult for the men to drop back into sleep when they awoke in the middle of the night like this; they became aware of the vivid odor of sweat hanging in the air, the white floodlights seeping through the broken blinds.

“Come fan me for ten minutes and I’ll give you a dirham,” a man on Yogan’s side of the room said.

His eyes now adjusted to the half-light, Yogan sat up and saw a figure cross the floor to where the voice had come from. After the room’s air-conditioning unit had broken weeks ago, the men had started collecting old newspapers to wave in front of their bedmate’s face at night. This way, at least one man in each bed could sleep decently in the heat. Yogan watched as the figure crouched to pick up a newspaper then hit his head on something metal, the railing of the bed, perhaps, on his way back up. “Ouuuch!” the man said. The clang reverberated like a gong, a sound that should have signalled the coming of sunrise or morning prayers, but only reminded Yogan that it was still night, and he’d have to find a way to return to sleep.

Yogan reached over to the other side of his bed, to alert Samar to the scene. This was the kind of incident they liked to feast on together in the daylight, drawing out the small animosities that grew among roommates. Gossip made them feel alive, childlike. Yogan’s hand found only a cool, empty patch of sheet. It took him a moment to understand that Samar was not in the bed, and that, if he wasn’t in the bed, it had to be Samar out in the middle of the floor with the newspaper, Samar getting swatted.

“What are you doing, you idiot?” he called into the dark.

“What do you bastards think this is, a fish market?” another voice said.

Yogan watched his friend drop the newspaper on the floor and return to their bunk. With a sharp breath, Samar hoisted himself up and collapsed beside Yogan, a palm on his forehead, as if he were checking himself for a fever. Countless nights over the past few weeks, Yogan had opened his eyes to the sight of Samar propped up on one elbow, holding a newspaper above Yogan’s bare chest, fanning committedly. “Go back to sleep,” Samar would urge. “Tomorrow it’s my turn,” his voice so sweetly nurturing that Yogan had wondered whether he’d forgotten to mention some secret child back in Mumbai. Now it was Yogan who propped himself up; he unfolded a newspaper from under their mattress and began to create a small wind for the two of them. “What were you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Samar said. “Don’t make everything your problem.”

Yogan lightly smacked Samar’s forehead with the newspaper. “Oho, what drama!”

But Samar wouldn’t speak. Another voice in the room answered for him. “He was asking for spare change. What else does he ask us for?”

At this, Samar clicked his tongue, sending his reply to the middle of the room. “You’re a real son of a bitch, you are!”

“Why do you need their money?” Yogan asked.

Samar again clicked his tongue, that universal sound that meant, Leave it, leave me. Drop the conversation. He turned away from Yogan to sleep.

“Do you have any news?” Roshni’s voice on the phone was booming, blooming, both.

“News, how?” Yogan said.

“You know—news!”

His wife’s questions on the morning bus to work filled Yogan with energy. He bounced his leg without pause, as if he were once again balancing his older daughter upon his knee.

“Yes, yes, I have news,” Yogan said. Now he was whispering. “But we’ll have to talk later, O.K.? I’m on the bus. I can’t talk freely.”

Beyond Roshni, the cry of his infant child erupted like a shard of lightning. He jerked his phone away from his ear for a moment, then brought it back. His daughter’s voice—already hearty and strong.

“You can’t talk freely? Listen to what I have to deal with! I don’t care if all your friends are jealous. I’ve been waiting six full months for your news!”

“Roshni, please, my jaan. Six months is nothing.”

“Six months is nothing? Wait until you see your daughter and you find how little she looks like you!”

Yogan leaned his forehead against the window; he didn’t want the man sitting next to him to witness his pleasure. “So you’ve been naughty with someone else, have you?”

“Don’t start with me now,” Roshni said. “I haven’t even had my tea. Call me later, or else I’ll have to call my new men. Men, you understand? More than one!”

“You deserve nothing less.”

“You don’t know how your oldest child is eating my brains asking for news. But don’t worry, I’ll tell her that her father is a little social butterfly who is afraid of spreading his own good fortune.”

With a laugh, he said, “Maybe I won’t tell you then.”

“Don’t tell! I’ll find another husband! I have so much time to myself these days!”

“And you should spend it wisely. With me, well, you just let your parents decide.”

“Fine, I’m putting up posters to advertise my freedom then. This time, I’ll have a love marriage.”

“Nobody too handsome, O.K.? Two beautiful faces make an ugly duckling.”

Yogan hadn’t told anyone his good news yet, not even Samar. There seemed to be much, these days, that they kept from each other.

No longer did Yogan have any use for his mustard-yellow construction hat, though he walked out of the accommodations with it under his arm each morning. From where the bus dropped off the men, Yogan hailed a taxi to the metro station, then rode the train to a shopping mall at the center of Dubai—a sprawling, bluish structure, which housed the ice rink that Yogan had been contracted to build a year ago. At home in Lucknow, he had helped build football and cricket fields before moving up to glossy hotels and office buildings. Buildings paid more, but Yogan had been happier working on the sporting fields, seeing the skinny young boys swinging wooden bats, sauntering onto freshly rolled grass, adrenaline already running through them. Yogan and his brothers had had to make do with the frequently soggy pastures behind their house. When they ran to retrieve a lost ball, they were guaranteed to feel the splash of mud across their smooth calves. The splattering sound of a bare foot against wet earth was a pleasure Yogan would never forget. When he returned home, his mother would exhale decisively, ordering him to pour water over his legs before coming inside. What had then been an annoyance seemed now an ecstasy—the cold well water licking at his bony knees, sending rivulets of red dirt worming down to the ground around his toes.

Building an ice rink was different from installing a sports field, but the spirit behind it was similar, Yogan thought. He’d been part of the team that had laid the tarp and the ice mat, and opened the water supply to fill the rink. He had checked that the pink antifreeze had made its way through every single tube of the ice mat, a moving wonder that had reminded him of the disco floor he and Roshni had once danced on before their children were born, their arms daringly clasped around each other’s waists.

To make the ice, the men had used ninety thousand litres of water, which felt like more than he’d used in the entire duration of his childhood. The water Yogan had known growing up was trickling, soft, and unalarming, except for the seasonal rains that required his parents’ roof to be re-thatched. What he saw at the ice rink, in comparison, was the water of stories, of cinema. The blast came from a hole twice the size of Yogan’s head, with enough force to drown an encroaching army. As the water exploded out of the pipe, Yogan gave a shocked giggle that swept among the other men, some of whom cheered and clapped, while others quietly removed their hard hats and held them in their hands. Yogan felt as if he had seen a waterfall, the Swiss Alps, all those stills of Europe that were used as backdrops for the best romantic numbers. As he conjured these pictures, he closed his eyes to enjoy the delicate cold spray that hovered above the torrent.

The rink was completed almost three months ahead of schedule. Because the men were being let go on short notice, an opportunity of further employment was communicated through the rink supervisor. If a handful of men wanted to stay on as skating instructors, they would be trained for free.

In a locker room behind the rink, Yogan donned a pair of formal black trousers, a white dress shirt with a slight tea stain on the collar, and a shiny, satin vest with three pearlescent buttons down the middle. He sprayed himself with a strong oud cologne he’d bought on sale at the supermarket, then rolled on his thick woolen socks. The skates he’d been given were made of pristine, stiff leather; the blades were sharpened for him when he hung them up at the end of each week. Now he tottered across the rubber mat of the back room, and in a single, practiced gesture, he was off gliding across the fresh morning ice.

For a long time, like everyone in his family, Yogan had believed in fate, the old idea that the same souls were reincarnated into the same families in order to relive past mistakes, at least until one lucky fool broke the spell. When he was growing up, his mother had often said that she was living out the life of her own mother, so it was no coincidence that she’d encountered the same hardships—a lame foot, an abusive mother-in-law, a savage bout of cancer that would surely see her to the end. Because she had predicted her life so accurately, Yogan and his siblings were convinced that she was clairvoyant, and, in moments of privacy, they would fearfully ask her whether she could tell them anything about their futures. Her mood usually changed at this question, as if the idea of her sons outliving her, loving women and children of their own, meant that her life would be shortened. Bitterly, she would toss them futures so bleak and unappealing that, more than once, Yogan had to talk his youngest brother out of hanging himself.

“You’ll live your father’s life, what else?” his mother would start. “You’ll owe every neighbor a debt and spend every holy day at a brothel. What? Did you think you were going to become a king?” She laughed at the audacity suggested by her own question, then opened her arms to welcome her son, whom only she could comfort, for it was she who had opened the wound to begin with.

Yogan, too, had believed some of her predictions. How could his life turn out any different than his father’s? Those first few years with Roshni, he had kept himself at a comfortable and loveless distance, in order to protect both of them from whatever qualities he might or might not have inherited from his father. But Yogan had become living proof that his mother’s predictions were bullshit. Yogan, who now spent his daylight hours gliding across ice, teaching children and adults to spin like dancers—he had not grown up to resemble anyone he knew.

“Morning, gentlemen,” the instructor, Felix, had said at the start of each training session.

He spoke only in English, and Yogan had been surprised at how quickly he was able to catch on. “What do we say, chaps? Slow and steady is the way of the coward.” Felix had held his trainees’ hands as he guided them across the rink. He’d skate backward, observing every shudder and slip of Yogan’s inexperienced ankles. “Gliding, you’re just gliding,” Felix would coax, and Yogan, holding Felix’s hands, found the courage to move his hips forward, one and then the other. “Now back on your own,” Felix would say, trailing at a slight distance.

Arms raised in caution, Yogan had imagined that he was learning to skate just as his younger daughter would soon learn to walk. Every time he’d fall, every time another man’s bladed boot slid within an inch of Yogan’s fingertips or earlobe, he thought of his daughter’s waddling footsteps, the many tumbles she would take, and he believed that this vision of the child he had yet to hold in his arms somehow kept him lucky. He’d stand and dust the frost off his backside, and, with the muzzy picture of her in his mind, set off with more and more force, until he was able to make it from one end of the rink to the other without anybody’s support.

Now Yogan skated in an elegant, sinewy line around the rink, something his father never could have dreamed of, and he understood that he had been keeping his success to himself because there was no conceivable way to explain any of it.

“Morning, Yogs,” Felix said as Yogan swished past him.

“Good morning, sir,” Yogan said in English.

“You tell your wife yet?”

“No, sir,” Yogan grinned. “I am waiting.”

“You tell her soon, all right? Don’t let the lady get away.”

He had meant to tell his wife earlier that day: with his raise, he had managed to arrange a work visa for Roshni, who would be able to join him with their two daughters within the next few months. When they arrived, Yogan would move out of the accommodations and into an apartment on the other side of the city, in Karama. He would once again share a bed with his wife, their daughters in cots beside them.

“Yes, sir,” Yogan said. Out of respect, he had turned around so that he was facing Felix as they spoke. Now it was Yogan who skated backward, scanning the rink for anyone who needed his help.

Later that week, Yogan once again woke to the sound of a swat, but this time it was his own hand that was stinging. He sat up quickly and with little confusion; Samar wanted to know if Yogan would fan him.

Yogan found and unfolded the sodden newspaper they kept between their mattress and the bed frame. Leaning over Samar, Yogan saw that he was wide awake. He placed a palm on Samar’s forehead to indicate something he wasn’t sure how else to convey—his affection, or his willingness to listen.

“Will you tell me now what happened to you?” Yogan asked.

“Just let me sleep,” Samar said.

“Listen, I have something to tell you, too.”

“I need three lakhs,” Samar said. “Do you have that?”

Yogan laughed at the figure. It was about what Samar would make in a year. “What do you need that for?” He accommodated his own arm under the warmth of Samar’s neck in order to fan him more comfortably. Again, Samar went silent; he wore a calm expression that told Yogan he was not exaggerating. Then Yogan put down the newspaper and used his free hand to turn Samar’s face toward his own. “Are you sick? Do you need to pay for medicine?”

“It would be better if I was,” Samar said.

“You’re going mad without Chanda or what? Your moon’s been hidden.”

At the sound of her name, something between them seemed to crack. Samar shook his head and covered his eyes with his hands. His voice lowered in shame or remorse, he began to speak.

There had been an issue with the contract he’d signed, he said. He hadn’t read it. The contract was typed in English with an Arabic translation stapled to the back. Only when his most recent paycheck was withheld had Samar called the recruiting agency to complain and discovered what the conditions of his employment really were:

According to this contract, the EMPLOYEE (“SAMAR BOBAL”) accepts the terms of the EMPLOYER/SPONSOR (“AL KHATIB AND BROWN CONSTRUCTION LLC”) as put forth by the Recruiting Agency (“SILVER HAWK RECRUITING”) that the EMPLOYEE agrees to pay the Recruiting Agency a non-refundable fee of Three Lakh Rupees (Rs. 300,000) as facilitated through a standard loan by the Recruiting Agency in exchange for employment and visa services.

In the mail, they had sent him a version in Hindi that he had read so many times he had it memorized.

What the woman had made clear to Samar over the phone was that the recruiting agency had neglected to charge him for his loan over the past year. From now on, they would withhold his salary until he earned out the cost of his loan. They had no answer for how long this would take—the math was Samar’s to do.

“I’m a dead man,” Samar said.

The air of hope seeped out of Yogan. “Run away, then,” he said. “Take a flight back tomorrow. How will they find you?” He was trying to sound practical, unworried, but his voice broke.

“I don’t have my passport,” Samar said. He turned away, and Yogan could think of nothing to do but pick up his newspaper and wave it rapidly over Samar’s neck.

“Everything I made,” Samar said, “I’ve sent home. I have nothing on me. I’ve barely eaten today, man.”

Yogan started to give Samar what he could. A Lucknowi man he had befriended worked at the coffee shop near the ice rink and would give him sandwiches and airy bags of potato chips for free. At the end of the day, Yogan would carry these items home in his hard hat and stash them in their top bunk, along with whatever else he could spare: a spotted banana, a Tetra Pak of strawberry milk, a sleeve of Parle-G biscuits.

There were others like Samar in the city—trapped men, men who had signed the wrong papers, men who’d walked into cool roadside offices with the same idea as Yogan but emerged with a different fate. There were others in the accommodations, too, and everyone chipped in what they could to keep these men afloat.

With morning came the sound of men unrolling their carpets for prayer, the clang of steel tumblers of tea and coffee, and, through the blinds, the harsh orange glow of the day. Someone in the room always shared his cup of tea with Samar, who sat alone by the window, picking at his skin, trying and failing to phone Chanda, who had stopped answering his calls once she heard about his situation. Sometimes Samar would leave her soft, pleading monologues as voice mail: “How can your brothers say I’m a fool? I came here for you. Everything was for you.”

Later, as the men lined up for the buses that took them to their respective workplaces, Yogan squinted into the raw white light to follow the shape of Samar’s body as it approached the doors of his bus. What did he expect to see? A sign of endurance? Resolve? There was just the tall, skinny hook of his friend, thinner now than he’d ever been, his shoulders slumped, getting on the bus with a full water bottle in hand, the bright shine of his shaved scalp replaced by a thick mop of black hair.

Yogan remembered one of their first nights in the city, when the men in the room had jousted and jabbed at one another, laughing until their voices wavered with sleep, and then fell, one by one, to silence. Yogan and Samar were the last two awake, and talked late into the night about things Yogan could no longer recall, though he did remember the man on the lower bunk issuing a weak punch to their mattress at some point, urging them to go to sleep.

“Have you found some new boyfriends, then?” Yogan asked. “I’ve been thinking about you. You and your harem.”

“What dirty thoughts you think!” Roshni said. “Thank God your youngest daughter has another father.”

“He can also come. Tell him to pack his suitcase.”

“Why did you call me?”

“I’m just missing you!”

“Missing me? Why don’t you use your brain for something better!”

“What could be better than thinking of my beautiful wife?”

Yogan was full of happiness. Earlier that morning, he had selected the apartment they would move into, a one-room flat with enough space for all four of them and their small accumulation of objects. The bathroom had a pristine white tub that looked as if it had never been used before. Above the tub was a small window of pebbled glass that gave the ceramic sink a flickering shimmer. It was agonizing to hold all this in his mind, Yogan thought, to have to wait to share it with his wife.

He was skating along the side of the rink, his phone back in his pocket. He had called his wife to share this dart of anticipation, this pulsing in his jaw. Now he slowed his stride and watched a child with the same dark complexion as his older daughter gain confidence in her movements. The girl glided on jaggedly in a pair of purple skates, with Yogan following some distance behind. He gave her space until she began to skid, and then he happily skated over to ask if she needed help.

“Can you stay close?” the girl said in English. He continued to skate alongside her, in case she lost her footing again.

Most afternoons passed this way. Yogan skated the length of the rink, stopping whenever a child seemed to be attempting a particularly risky move, full of speed and reckless bravery. He’d wait, hoping, always hoping, that the child would pull it off and then try again.

He found it strange to see so many people who looked like him on the ice. People whose countries were rarely cold, people who had never seen a world caked in real winter. How brave they were to try to balance on two blades as thin as the tips of pencils, pushing off from the sides, hands outstretched for balance, their panicked eyes searching for a groove in the ice they could use, then flashing skyward to catch the glance of a proud mother or father watching from the stands. Look at my child, these parents would think. My child is doing the impossible. My child is dancing on ice in the middle of the desert.

He often imagined his daughters skating, their pleated skirts wrapping around them as they spun. For them, it would be as easy as walking on land, he thought. It was their inheritance after all, their father’s fate. But skating would not be a career for them. He would not allow that. It would be only a supplementary detail on applications, something that would win them admission into exclusive, wintry places. For once, he wished that all he’d believed about fate was true, for it would mean that his daughters would inherit his luck, that it would take them to far-off lands and give them impossible chances.

After his shift, Yogan changed into a T-shirt and new jeans that were faded and fashionably ripped at the knees, and took the metro to the Mall of the Emirates. A sensor pinged as Yogan stepped onto the shiny marble floor of the store. The man from Kabul sat behind a brightly lit display of gold and diamond jewelry, dressed in a crisp white shirt and sand-colored pants. The men in the accommodations had started referring to him as King Kabul, KK for short. This was because KK had recently chronicled the full story of his ascent on his YouTube channel.

He had first moved to Dubai to work construction, as they all had. Soon after, he was hired as a personal driver for one of his employers. When his employer began trusting him to pick up orders and mail confidential paperwork, he was given a laptop, a magical thing. A year later, having proved himself, King Kabul was instated as the general manager of the employer’s family jewelry store. These days, he spent each Eid with his employer’s family, eating meat and drinking sugary sherbet from the family’s expensive and fragile china. But the best part of all that had happened, KK had told the camera, was that he had been able to bring his family to the city. KK’s wife now worked as a cook for his employer’s family, who paid full tuition for his son to attend a rigorous international school.

“Look at you, brother,” Yogan said to KK now, his nervous hand flat on the cold display table. “I don’t want to invite the evil eye, but I need to tell someone. My Roshni is coming here, too.”

KK pointed at an amulet of a blue-and-white eyeball above the door of the shop. “There’s no evil eye here. Your good fortune is my good fortune. How old are your daughters? Maybe they can meet my son, Abas.”

“One is three. The other will be one soon.” Yogan inched his phone out of his pocket to show KK one of the photographs Roshni had sent. A selfie, with his youngest daughter sleeping in the crook of her elbow, swaddled in a pink blanket. “I hope we can put them in good schools,” Yogan said. “Like Abas.”

“There’s no end to what we hope,” KK said. He added that he and his wife had recently started thinking about sending Abas abroad for college. The boy was only twelve—he still had time to decide—but KK would need to begin saving, in case his employer became unable to sponsor Abas’s education. KK had heard of other children at his son’s school getting scholarships for colleges in London and America. “Imagine,” KK said.

“Inshallah,” Yogan said.

Behind the man from Kabul, a display case of gold and silver chains gave off small flashes of starlight.

“Hey, how much?” Yogan asked, pointing at one.

KK keyed open the glass case and held a delicate gold chain between his thumb and middle finger. From under the counter, he brought out a dark velvet tray, upon which he laid the chain gently, as if it were worth millions. Yogan touched the smooth gold clasp with the tip of his index finger; the metal was still warm from the powerful display light.

“When you’re ready,” KK said, “I’ll give you a discount. But not now. For now, you save all your change. There are lots of expenses coming for you.”

Yogan returned home to the accommodations that night a little dazed. He wanted to call Roshni again and tell her about KK’s hopes. He imagined that she would laugh, then fling an insult or two in his direction. “Abroad this, abroad that, it’s a mania these days,” she’d say. “If my girls are that smart, let them be smart near their mother. Why should I send them away?”

But she wouldn’t stay angry for long. After a moment, she would admit her own secret hopes. “Do you think if the girls go, we’ll ever get to visit?”

These days, no matter what Roshni was saying, the sound of her voice made Yogan part his lips in anticipation. How different this felt from his first few months in the city, when he had avoided her calls. Back then, the men had lined up with their phones and chargers at the two available outlets, some crying discreetly, others saying quick, important things like bank-account access codes and routing numbers, before cutting to the bye-bye.

Without fail, Samar had called Chanda each night before she went to sleep.

“Did you braid your hair?” he would ask her, and, if she said yes, it meant that she would be sleeping soon, and, if she said no, it meant that she could talk for another ten minutes.

The men had grown used to hearing Samar’s romantic conversations before bed. Sweetie, pinkie, and darling—all those sugary monikers that followed on the heels of “hello.” When the outpouring of such terms stopped, the men had noticed that, too.

“Where’s our Romeo these days?” they teased.

Four months had passed since Samar had learned about his debt. The men no longer mocked him; they were anxious to know if Chanda had responded to any of the hundreds of messages Samar had left her.

That night, as Yogan scrolled through his phone, another man approached Samar, who was sitting on the floor, gently peeling a banana. “Heard anything, or no? About Chanda?” the man asked.

Samar looked up and smiled a little crazily. “Don’t talk to me about that whore,” he said.

The following night, Samar returned from work and climbed straight up to his bunk without food or a shower.

Yogan came in from his own shower shortly after. “At least change into something clean,” he said. “I also have to sleep in that bed.”

Samar gave no response, only a kind of whimper that must have escaped accidentally.

“You want something to eat?”

Samar didn’t answer, but the other man in the room, hearing the question, looked at Yogan as if he were an idiot, as if he’d asked a fish if it wanted to swim.

Yogan went downstairs to the common kitchen with some cash in his pocket. He found one of the men he knew heating a bowl of lumpy yellow daal and a frozen paratha in the microwave. The man watched as Yogan counted out his asking price and placed the bills on the countertop. Only once the cash was secured in the man’s pocket did he hand over his warm plate of food.

In the room, the other men moved in silence as Yogan sat beside Samar on their bed, the plate in his hands. “Eat something,” he said. With his free hand, he traced the rope of Samar’s spine protruding from under his damp T-shirt.

“Did something happen?” Yogan asked. A question for anyone in the room.

“Nothing,” another man answered. “He’s just being dramatic.”

Then Samar sat up. His eyes were webbed with strawberry capillaries.

“How are you always home so early?” he asked Yogan. “Did you get fired, or what?”

“You should eat,” Yogan said.

Samar looked down at Yogan’s feet, on which he wore a pair of bright-red chappals. “Where did you buy those? Are they real Nikes?”

Yogan’s instinct was to jump off their bed and kick his slippers into the darkness under the bottom bunk. Just then, the plate of food, which he had rested on the bed beside Samar, went flying to the floor, the daal splattering across the linoleum.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Samar said. He held his own wrist, as if to discipline it. Then he eased himself onto the floor and began scooping the hot food into his cupped hands. His eyes had gone small and dark with tears, and he brought the inside of his elbow to dab at his wet nose.

A wave of misery and unease passed over the men, who regarded one another. Yogan crossed over to where Samar was crouched and placed a hand on his back. “Leave it,” he said, offering him a bath rag.

The other men began to collect the broken shards of the plate.

When Samar’s voice finally came, it was thick with phlegm. “Her brothers found someone to void our marriage. She’s marrying someone else,” he said.

“Shit.” It was all Yogan could say. He opened his arms for Samar to collapse into.

The metro ran mainly aboveground, but it was different from the trains in India because it did not rattle or jostle or violently assert itself. Rather, it slid to its stop. The doors opened with a gush of cool, sweetly scented air, and most of the seats inside shone in want of a patron. The train re-started with the rush of an airplane taking off, and within seconds it was speeding above the roads on cement beams tall enough to allow a panoramic view of the city. The number of skyscrapers had doubled since Yogan and Samar had first arrived in Dubai, almost two years earlier. Yogan had heard the other men saying that the towers were getting taller and more complex, and as he considered these rising obelisks of the future he thought of them not as a builder, evaluating materials and weight distribution, but as a father, anticipating the wonder of his daughters. Far beyond the skyscrapers, Yogan could see the still unfinished sporting stadium that Samar and others were working on. It was shaped like a disk, a silver mound.

It was National Day, a rare day off for all the men. Yogan was sitting beside Samar on the metro. It had been ages since he had seen Samar in his everyday clothes, and he noticed how the T-shirt his friend wore hung off his shoulders and neck.

When they’d first arrived in the station, Samar had seemed overcome with awe. He had never been inside a metro station in Dubai and couldn’t grasp how to read the digital maps that flashed on large screens above them. It was then that Yogan had admitted that he’d used the train before.

The day out was Yogan’s treat—an attempt to inject some life back into his friend, who hadn’t spoken to him since the news of Chanda’s engagement, other than to convey blank thanks for his rare acceptance of a nighttime meal.

Yogan also had to deliver his own news: he was moving out the following week.

At the mall, Yogan led Samar toward the sandwich shop. “Let’s have something? I’m hungry” was how he put it. Samar nodded his head thinly, as if he were doing Yogan a favor by agreeing to eat.

They ordered swarthy, buttered paninis full of ripe tomatoes and melted mozzarella. To Yogan’s surprise, Samar had an appetite. He appeared windswept by the ebullience of the mall, whipping his head left and right to examine the surrounding shop windows with their pedestals and handbags and slender, faceless mannequins.

“You’ve come here before?” Samar asked.

“This is what I wanted to tell you,” Yogan began.

He led the way to the ice rink, where the jaunty receptionist recognized him and allowed him access to the back room to get his skates. She handed Samar a pair of skates while Yogan paid for their day passes.

If Samar was confused, he did not show it. He had taken on, instead, the buoyant air of a dazzled child. “You want me to wear these?” he said, laughing. “I’m going to break my legs!”

“I’ll help you,” Yogan said. He already had his own skates knotted tight.

Yogan went down on his knees to fit Samar’s feet inside the skates, pulling at the laces to insure that his ankles were well secured. As he tied the knots, he explained that he’d been offered a job as a skater. He told Samar about the apartment in Karama.

Samar gave Yogan’s shoulder a brotherly punch, and said, laughing, “You bastard! This is your job?”

The laughter filled Yogan with relief. Holding his friend’s hand, Yogan ushered Samar onto the ice. Yogan suggested that he hold on to the side barriers, but Samar remained tethered to him, their damp fingers intertwined. The movements did not seem to come easily to Samar; he lifted his feet one at a time, as if he were marching. When they gained some speed, a wild, coy look appeared on his face.

“Try to lead with your hips,” Yogan said. “Let me show you.” He guided Samar to the barrier and pushed off alone, pointing down at his feet so Samar could understand what he meant.

“Do it again. Let me watch you,” Samar said when he returned. He was grinning. “Do you know any tricks?”

Again Yogan pushed off, swerving past the children and the teen-agers on the ice as Samar whistled at him from the side of the rink. “Look at this hero!” Samar called.

As Yogan skated, the chorus of an old Bollywood song began to ring in his pocket. Knowing that it was Roshni calling for their afternoon chat, he sent the call quickly to voice mail. Each time he heard that ringtone during this time of his life, he remembered how he and his siblings used to sit in front of the television with unbreakable focus, watching the finale of the movie in which the song featured. It was a declaration-of-love song, the hero and the heroine in their best clothes, dancing at the helm of a choreographed cast with clinking bangles and shimmying bellies. Finally, they were no longer bashful and had confessed their affection, which was too vast to convey in dialogue; it had to be set to music. Yogan remembered the great smile that Saif Ali Khan had worn as he danced. He had understood something about that smile even as a child. Where Yogan came from—a village outside Lucknow where sons were still preferred to daughters, most marriages were arranged, and a man out of work for a single week could render a family utterly damned—a dance number like that, in which the hero follows a girl in a shimmering blue lehenga, telling her that she looks like a piece of the moon, proved that somewhere in the world there was romance. It made life seem bearable.

Later, when Yogan looked back on this day with Samar, it was this song that he remembered, this song which became, over the years, a kind of engine for him. It unstuck him from himself when he needed it to, buoying him forward when he hesitated. That day at the rink he was moving inside a fantasy. In five days, his wife and his daughters would land in Dubai. In five days, he would hold his wife’s waist between his palms. He would cup the soft head of his new daughter, make a show of searching her face for traces of himself. It was Roshni that Yogan was thinking of that day with Samar, Roshni he imagined when their fingers were intertwined.

“Let me try,” Samar said when Yogan returned to him.

He made a few unsteady strides, his hands in front of him for protection, then gained confidence, his movements nascent but full of speed. Then Samar leaned back to avoid crashing into someone, and Yogan knew before it happened that he would correct himself by tilting too far forward too quickly, which would cause him to lose his footing. He watched his friend fall onto his knees; with his palms, he kept his body from hitting the ice.

Yogan skated over. Samar appeared more subdued than he had earlier, perhaps a little embarrassed. Yogan offered his hands to pull Samar up, and Samar took them awkwardly. He sent a crystalline wad of spit to the side.

“Why did you bring me here?” Samar asked. “To show off?”

“Come on, bhai,” Yogan said, urging him to the side of the rink.

“You want to watch me hurt myself so you can feel good?”

Yogan felt Samar’s hands grab his collar, and then he knew to anticipate the approach of knuckles, which flashed by his cheek like a pink ribbon, narrowly avoiding impact. Yogan glided backward to catch himself, one of his hands on his cheek, which had grown warm with shame. Then he heard a whistle that he recognized as the sound of his boss approaching. Yogan put up both his hands, as if in surrender. “There is no problem here, Felix,” he said in English. “This is my good friend. We are enjoying on our holiday.”

“I’m going to have to ask your good friend to get off the ice,” Felix said.

On the way home, Samar rested his head on Yogan’s shoulder. On the open plain of Samar’s neck, the skin appeared to have been shaved carelessly; there was a thin scabbed line across his Adam’s apple. Yogan lightly tapped his fingers against the healing skin, if only to show that he’d noticed it.

“You’re going to have to take care of yourself,” Yogan said. “When I’m gone, you’ll need to become close to someone else who can bring you food.”

“I’ll handle it,” Samar said.

“I’ll visit you. Every Sunday. Don’t forget.”

“Can you give me some money before you go? To tide me over until I find someone else?”

Yogan had prepared for this question, and also for its answer. Still, his throat swelled painfully, and he waited for the taut feeling to pass. Quietly, he managed to give his response: “I need the money for my girls. My oldest needs a school uniform. She needs textbooks.”

“I’ll manage,” Samar said.

He pointed at Yogan’s lap to ask whether he could use it to rest, and Yogan, with an open palm ready to catch his friend’s head, said, “Come.”

Some months after Yogan moved out, Samar disappeared from the accommodations one day, like a frame cut out of a movie. He didn’t get on the bus to the construction site. He wasn’t in his bunk when the other men came back.

The local news rarely picked up such a story; you had to dream of the dead, then wake up with a premonition. A text message received late at night, read over and over in the morning, would confirm what had happened. A young man had fallen—or jumped—in front of an oncoming train.

He had been only twenty-seven. His hands and feet were always colder than the rest of him, Yogan remembered, despite the incessant heat of those days. In bed, Yogan used to warm Samar’s rawboned fingers with his own, teasing him for his poor circulation.

There were no last rites; a ceremony would have been too expensive. No one went to claim the body. Samar’s clothes, his razor, his smartphone, and his charger were distributed among the men in the room. And, as for them, what could they do but line up for the morning bus, letting their thoughts wander, until someone issued an order, or asked sweetly, through the phone, what was new and had they eaten? ♦

In the streets of Los Angeles, in June, as the city clashed with ICE, the most visible symbol of the protest was the Mexican flag, the tricolor raised over the haze of tear gas and black smoke. Online, the symbol of resistance against immigration raids was something softer. On Instagram and TikTok, the children of Mexican immigrants shared photos of their parents with the same trending audio: “Hasta la raíz,” a song released by the Mexican artist Natalia Lafourcade in 2015, not long before Donald Trump descended his golden escalator. “It’s personal because if my grandparents didn’t risk their lives migrating 'Pal Norte,’ I wouldn’t be the first one in my family to graduate college,” Grecia Lopez, a radio and TV host, wrote in an Instagram post that included a grainy film photo of her grandfather, with “Hasta la raíz” playing over it. “Hasta la raíz,” which means “to the root,” is putatively a breakup song, but, in the past decade, it has served as a sort of anthem for Mexicans in the United States. “I carry you within, to the root,” the chorus goes, in Spanish. “Even if I hide myself behind a mountain, and find myself in a field full of sugar cane, there’s no way, my moonbeam, that you can leave.” If Lafourcade’s lyrics sound sentimental, that just makes them well-suited for the way American-born Mexicans feel about Mexico. Last year, I was catching up with a journalist friend who grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, when she told me about visiting her relatives in Mexico City for the first time. I asked her, cheekily, if she played “Hasta la raíz,” as she landed at the airport. “Shut up,” she told me. “The way I actually did.”

In March, as ICE arrests under the new Trump Administration topped thirty thousand and the President threatened new tariffs on Mexico, I arrived in Veracruz, a port city on Mexico’s east coast, and caught a cab up into the mountains to meet Lafourcade in her home town. Lafourcade rarely talks about politics; in her public statements, she avoids endorsing any parties or movements. I still wanted, however, to find out what the forty-one-year-old singer was putting in her music that, in 2025, had turned it into a form of protest. As the cab drove along a coastal highway, fields full of sugarcane stretched out to the horizon. We began to climb into the mountains, and fields gave way to jungle, and then to the sumptuous green of coffee trees. I had plans to meet Lafourcade at a son jarocho concert in Xalapa, a university town in the mountains. (Son jarocho, meaning “Veracruz sound,” is the state’s folk music, one of the oldest musical traditions in Mexico.) I got to the venue—and took a seat at a small attached café—early. A dusty Toyota Prius pulled up to the curb outside and Lafourcade, wearing a flowing denim shirt and a large, handmade ceramic necklace, slid out from the back seat and turned around to offer a hand to her fellow passenger, her mother. Inside, patrons exchanged grins as the famous singer found her seat, though everyone was careful to remain quiet. At the front of the café, Alejandro Loredo, a folk musician, was giving a talk about the importance of preserving Mexico’s vast array of deep-rooted regional music.

In his arms, Loredo cradled a jarana de arco, a version of a traditional string instrument that he played, unconventionally, with a bow. Loredo had made it based on descriptions of some of the earliest string instruments that the Spanish brought into Mexico—“which first arrived here in Veracruz, of course,” Loredo said. (In 1519, Hernán Cortés anchored his ship around a hundred miles east of where we sat.) Lafourcade nodded intently as Loredo spoke about the importance of using madera endémica, wood native to Veracruz, to build his instruments. Lafourcade leaned back in her seat and gestured for me to come closer. She pointed at Loredo. “I love that,” she whispered.

As Loredo finished his speech, a procession of folk musicians came up to Lafourcade, greeting her warmly. In some ways, it was an incongruous scene—a female pop star surrounded by older male folk artists. But in the past few years Lafourcade has become well known in the places where people still play son jarocho. That’s because, after gaining mainstream stardom in the Spanish-speaking world in the two-thousands, Lafourcade made a startling pivot. In the following decade, she began releasing albums of folk music. It’s difficult to find an analogue for this sort of artistic transformation in the United States. She inhabits the space that a pop star like, say, Sabrina Carpenter might, if Carpenter suddenly began recording Woody Guthrie songs. Lafourcade herself speaks modestly about this transformation. In the café, she was deferential, almost shy, as she spoke to the gathered soneros. “I wish I could play like them,” Lafourcade later told me. When she became interested in son jarocho, in her thirties, she didn’t feel that she properly understood the music of her home state; it was familiar to her but unknown, like a tree in her yard that she had never learned the name of. That’s why spending time with folk musicians—in the mountains of Veracruz, in fishing villages on the coast—had become so important to her. “I just want it to be what I’m breathing,” Lafourcade said.

In recent years, a surprising array of popular artists have made a turn toward tradition. Bad Bunny’s latest record pulses with salsa rhythms; Beyoncé put out a country album. In Mexico, one of the most popular new acts is Peso Pluma, a twenty-six-year-old who sings corridos, a genre popular with ranchers. But Lafourcade’s transformation is more complete. “It’s a kind of oft-told story: at some point, she became more interested in her own roots, and the music of her parents,” David Byrne, of Talking Heads, told me. “But she jumped in with both feet.” Byrne began listening to Lafourcade when she released her early albums, “Casa” (2005) and “Hu Hu Hu” (2009). “They weren’t exactly rock; I would say a little more like trip-hop or something like that,” Byrne said. When, in the early years of her career, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times asked Lafourcade about her influences, she mentioned Fiona Apple and Björk. Then, in 2015, she released the album “Hasta la raíz.” “Musically, it made a statement,” Byrne said. It was still indie music—the coursing guitar on the title track wouldn’t sound entirely out of place next to a Father John Misty song. But the guitar is a huapango riff, a rhythm that cane harvesters and fishermen, in a place like Veracruz, have stomped their feet to for hundreds of years. Byrne enjoyed the album, and, on a whim, he went to see Lafourcade play a free show at Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors festival at Damrosch Park, in 2017. “I went not knowing how popular she was,” Byrne said. The park was so packed with Lafourcade’s fans that Byrne could barely see the stage. “I was way, way in the back, thinking to myself, ‘O.K., well, I’ll buy tickets next time.’ ”

As Lafourcade and the other musicians chatted in the café, a young girl and her parents began guiding guests into the concert hall, a simple bamboo room with high ceilings, and windows made out of glass recycled from bodega fridges. Lafourcade, her mother, and I were guided up to the top of wooden bleachers in front of the stage, which swayed precipitously underneath us. Lafourcade’s mother gripped her daughter’s knee, and Lafourcade turned to me and said, only half joking, “Don’t move at all during the concert.” For the first couple of songs, as Loredo played alone, we all remained still. But, as even more musicians joined Loredo onstage, Lafourcade couldn’t resist: I looked over, and she was playing the drums on her knees and swaying back and forth to the rhythm from the marimbol. “Sweet cane, brave cane,” one of the soneros sang out in Spanish. As the music swelled, Lafourcade’s mother forgot her fear and began clapping her hands along with the music. “Bueno!” Lafourcade shouted.

The state of Veracruz stretches out along a quiet line of steep volcanic mountains, which cascade down into the Gulf Coast. In 2019, Lafourcade decided to quit her life in Mexico City and move back to her home town of Coatepec, a city filled with crumbling haciendas built hundreds of years ago, and surrounded by lush hillsides of overgrown coffee plants. She told her then boyfriend, a Venezuelan documentary filmmaker named Juan Pablo López-Fonseca, that she had made up her mind. “The only people we know there are your mom and her friends,” he told Lafourcade. He couldn’t go, but he knew Lafourcade well enough to know that wouldn’t stop her. He helped her load up her car, and she drove east out of Mexico City.

Lafourcade told me recently that she thought of this move as going to Veracruz, not leaving Mexico City. But there were reasons she’d grown tired of the capital. Lafourcade’s manager, Rocío Alcazar (who is also her second cousin), told me that Lafourcade couldn’t go out for a coffee in Mexico City without getting mobbed by fans asking for selfies. “It’s a locura,” Alcazar said. Lafourcade had been famous since she was a teen-ager. Going back to Veracruz gave her a way to reconnect to her childhood.

Lafourcade was born in Mexico City, in 1984. Her father, Gastón Lafourcade, a Chilean who fled Augusto Pinochet’s regime, was once a harpsichordist and a master craftsman of the instrument. Her mother, María del Carmen Silva Contreras, is a pianist and music educator. The couple separated when Lafourcade was a toddler, and Silva Contreras took her daughter to live near family friends—artists who had settled on a ranch outside of Coatepec. Lafourcade grew up swimming in creeks and playing in the woods of the hillside property. On her sixth birthday, she told her mother that she wanted to ride one of the horses. Silva Contreras told Lafourcade that she was too small, but Lafourcade simply waited for the adults to go inside before approaching one of the mares. She came up behind the animal’s tail; the horse tensed, then kicked her in the face.

After the incident, she needed reconstructive surgery, and had brain inflammation so severe that when she tried to look up, all she saw was black. Even once she was well enough to leave the hospital, she had trouble walking more than a few steps. Lafourcade had been a talkative, impetuous child, but, in the months after the injury, she was laconic and subdued. Doctors told Silva Contreras that her daughter might never be the same. “They said I might not make it in school, I might not make it in a career,” Lafourcade said.

“I told them ‘No,’ ” Silva Contreras said, looking at me intensely over the table at dinner after the son jarocho show. “ ‘I’m going to bring her back.’ ” Silva Contreras told me that she knew her daughter had a rare musical ability (when Lafourcade was just nine months old, her mother had overhead her harmonizing with the tones of their vacuum cleaner). Now Silva Contreras tried to use music to help Lafourcade regain her development. “The first problem was one of willpower,” Silva Contreras said. “I needed observation, imitation, curiosity.” Inspired by Montessori-style education, Silva Contreras followed where Lafourcade’s interest led. If one day she wanted to dance, they danced; if another day she wanted to sing songs, they sang songs. Silva Contreras is convinced that this winding path brought Lafourcade back to herself.

Picking around a kale salad, Lafourcade said that the mark this experience left on her—besides a thin scar, shaped like a horseshoe, between her eyebrows—was a belief in her own intuition. In those early years, following her predilections was how she regained motor skills and relearned how to speak. After two months of healing, she went back to school, where music remained her obsession. Around the time she turned ten, Lafourcade and Silva Contreras moved to Mexico City, and she became preoccupied with the idea of becoming a singer. Silva Contreras didn’t take this seriously at first. But she helped Lafourcade make a recording studio in their bathroom, with a keyboard and an eight-track set. One day, Silva Contreras got an unexpected call from the Mexican media conglomerate TV Azteca; Lafourcade had called the company seeking a role, and now it was offering her a tryout for a musical program. Silva Contreras decided to let her audition, thinking it could be an educational experience. “There were a hundred girls there. They all looked like Barbies,” Silva Contreras remembered. Surprising her mother, Lafourcade was a success, and, at just fourteen, she joined a teen pop trio called Twist, performing on a TV show of the same name.

At dinner, Lafourcade talked about these years without a hint of pleasure in her voice. “I was too young,” she said. The other members of Twist teased her when they saw an embroidered bag her mother had made her. They said that she was “too hippie,” and that she was going to get kicked out. Across the table from me, Lafourcade smiled with sharp satisfaction. “But the opposite happened,” she said. After less than a year, the TV station disbanded Twist, but the group’s manager began working to build a new act around Lafourcade. At one point, the station brought in new potential bandmates for her. “They were these delicious girls. They were teen-agers but they looked like adults. They looked like the Spice Girls,” Lafourcade said. “They’re too tall—I’ll look ridiculous,” she told her manager. “You’ll grow,” he said, shrugging. (At forty-one, she still hasn’t reached five feet.) She began recruiting friends from her school, a music academy called Fermatta with a campus in Mexico City. By this time, she understood that her voice was only one part of why the industry liked her, or other female artists. “I picked friends I thought were very pretty,” she said. “But I learned they weren’t ‘TV pretty.’ ”

Ximena Sariñana, who today is a famous Mexican singer and actress, was a year below Lafourcade at Fermatta. Sariñana recalls Lafourcade as “the absolute popular girl.” “I would be in the cafeteria with my nerdy musician friends who only listened to grunge and Pearl Jam, and suddenly Natalia would go into the cafeteria surrounded by a bunch of girlfriends,” Sariñana said. “She’d be making a lot of noise—she was so fashionable, loud, and always, always very herself, very comfortable in her own skin.” One day, Sariñana was doing her homework with her headphones on when Lafourcade came up and tapped her on the shoulder. In a friendly tone, Lafourcade told Sariñana that she had heard Sariñana was a good singer. Lafourcade got more serious: “But are you a really good singer?” she asked. Lafourcade was still writing and recording her own songs, and she needed backup. “When we spent time together at the piano, and I understood what she wanted to do, I was, like, O.K., I understand why she would need really good singers,” Sariñana said. Within a few semesters, Lafourcade had dropped out of school: she had a record contract with Sony.

When Lafourcade released her first album, “Natalia Lafourcade,” in 2002, she became a household name in Mexico. (If you have a Mexican in your life, see if they can hum the chorus to “En el 2000”; the song was ubiquitous on the radio that year.) By then, Sariñana and Lafourcade were close, and Sariñana watched Lafourcade, who was then seventeen, struggle with this new fame. She recalled that Lafourcade bristled against the pop-princess marketing that the label pushed on her. In those years, Sariñana said, “you were either very alternative and very rock—which was mostly men in bands—or you were very pop. And if you were pop, you were plastic, and people were telling you what to wear and how to sound.”

Lafourcade soon tried out the other side of the Mexican pop-rock binary. At Fermatta, Lafourcade had worked with a group of three musicians to produce her demos, and she recruited them into a new band they called Natalia Lafourcade y la Forquetina. “I definitely think it was something she needed to do at that point, because it must have been really lonely to be a solo artist at seventeen,” Sariñana said. The band released only one album, the alt-rock “Casa.” The album won a Latin Grammy in 2006. Then, after months of touring through the U.S. and Mexico, Lafourcade called her bandmates to her house and told them she was done. “I told the band they could keep everything, they could keep the name, I just needed to leave,” Lafourcade said.

Silva Contreras, recalling that time, said that she had seen that her daughter would need a way out, and that Lafourcade would need to feel like she’d made her own decision. Silva Contreras had a close friend who lived in Ottawa, and this friend found an English-language program at the local university. Together, the two women filled out an application for Lafourcade. When an acceptance letter arrived, Silva Contreras handed it to her daughter: “Look, the university has invited you to come study!” Lafourcade, taking the bait, moved to Canada. (If Lafourcade was ever offended when she discovered this subterfuge, she doesn’t show it—when Silva Contreras told me the story over dinner, Lafourcade laughed and joined in on the telling. “I had no idea,” she said.)

Heading north was a chance to stop being famous. When other Latino students recognized her in Ottawa, Lafourcade told them that she wasn’t interested in being friends with other Latinos, that she didn’t want to speak Spanish. She also tried to distance herself from music, but, when she moved in with a few classmates, she couldn’t avoid it: her “bedroom”—a couch in the living room—was where her roommates held rehearsals for their Fela Kuti cover band. “I loved it,” she said. At our dinner table, she began loudly humming the bass line to Kuti’s song “Zombie.” When she returned to Mexico City, she also returned to recording, and released “Hu Hu Hu” (2009), a folk-pop album, with three songs in her new English. At the 2009 Latin Grammys, it was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Album.

The album’s success meant that, in 2010, Lafourcade received a coveted invitation. That year, Mexico celebrated its bicentennial, and she was asked to sing in a concert in the capital. On La Día de la Independencia, in September, more than a million Mexicans poured into El Zócalo, the central plaza in Mexico City. As the renowned conductor Alondra de la Parra led a full orchestra, Lafourcade, in a white dress with white flowers in her hair, performed some of the great standards of the Mexican songbook. As she sang the chorus to the iconic “Cielito Lindo,” alongside singers Ely and Lo Blondo, she opened her arms wide and welcomed the audience to sing with her. “Más fuerte, México!” she called out. Hundreds of thousands of voices rang out in response: “Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta y no llores.” Lafourcade felt euphoric. “I was singing Mexican music, for Mexican people,” she said. “That night, with the orchestra, was like a root that pulled me to the heart of my country.” Onstage, she felt a sense of her career changing. “I don’t want to sing in English anymore. I don’t want to pretend to be any indie artist. I want to learn to sing this music,” she remembered thinking. When she went back home, she immersed herself in classic Mexican music: the boleros of María Grever and Alvaro Carrillo, the rancheras of José Alfredo Jiménez, and, most important, the canciones of Agustín Lara.

Lara, born in 1897, was a crooner, Mexico’s Cole Porter. Like Lafourcade, he was born in Veracruz, and some of his most beloved songs are about the state. “Veracruz, it vibrates in my being / One day I will have to return to your distant shores,” he sings in one chorus. Lafourcade had grown up listening to Lara, but, as she tried singing some of his most familiar songs, she had a rare experience: failure. “I felt very far away from it,” she said. “I didn’t even know how to approach singing those words.” With her guitar and a hard drive full of Lara’s music, she moved into a cabin in the mountains, on the same ranch where the mare had kicked her all those years ago.

On a warm morning, a couple of days after we’d had dinner together, Lafourcade picked me up in a Jeep outside my hotel in Coatepec. As we drove north out of the city, she told me we were following the same route she used to take to elementary school. The road was like a green tunnel, enclosed by tropical species of oak. We climbed higher into the hills, and she turned the Jeep off the road, toward a cattle gate. “This is it,” she said as we pulled into a driveway. We were on the ranch of her childhood. As we got out of the car, two large Xoloitzcuintles—a wonderfully bizarre hairless Mexican dog breed—recognized her, and they ran up to greet us. She bent down and petted them, and then stood up. “Let me show you where I recorded ‘Mujer Divina,’ ” she said.

Lafourcade led me up to a cabin, an elegant one-room studio with whitewashed walls. A mattress lay on a raised platform, and there was a simple wooden desk by a generous window. Large, smooth river stones served as stools. Lafourcade sat on the desk and gestured toward the window; outside, a magenta bougainvillea hung luxuriously in the sun. “I spent months here,” she said. “I would work all day, and Rocío would come knock on this window when it was time for dinner.” On the ranch, Lafourcade was hosted by one of her oldest family friends, Rocío Sagaón, a renowned ballerina, who had danced alongside Pedro Infante during the golden age of Mexican cinema. When she and Lafourcade met in the evenings, “Rocío would always ask me what I found so interesting about Lara,” Lafourcade said. The questions were subtle enough that Lafourcade realized only years later that Sagaón had been trying to get her to consider Lara’s infamous womanizing (he was married six times). But, even without Lafourcade noticing its effect, Sagaón’s gentle instruction still pushed her to think about the role of women in Lara’s music. Who was the “mujer divina”—the divine woman—he sang about? What were her characteristics, besides her desirability?

In the cabin, Lafourcade spent hours listening to another artist from Veracruz, Antonia del Carmen Peregrino Álvarez. Better known as Toña la Negra, the Haitian Mexican singer had become renowned in the forties and fifties for her sultry, sophisticated interpretations of Lara’s songbook. Unlike Lara—who was almost always yearning and mournful in his songs—Toña sounded amorous and hopeful. Lafourcade loved Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and, in Toña’s music, she found similar depth. “But it was in Spanish!” she said. “I felt like, ‘Oh, this is the sound of Veracruz.’ I could hear the port, I could see the colors.”

When Lafourcade released “Mujer Divina,” a year after she arrived at the ranch, it stunned her fans: instead of an indie album, Lafourcade had created twelve covers of Lara songs, built around a series of duets with prominent Latin American artists, including the Bossa Nova luminary Gilberto Gil. Lafourcade was audacious with her interpretations. Take “Limosna,” one of Lara’s longing, slow boleros. In Lara’s song, Lafourcade noticed an energetic fiddle, dancing around the singer’s voice; in her version, she replaced the violin with a ukulele and sped up the tempo, making the once plaintive song playful and self-confident—“Just give me a bit of your touch,” she sings happily in the chorus. Lafourcade reworked Lara’s “Copla Guajira,” into a new song, adding entire verses. Whereas Lara sang, “Whenever you talk to me about love, you tell me a lie,” Lafourcade sings, “Talk to me about loves that make me feel more alive.” “She’s a punk,” the singer-songwriter and producer Adán Jodorowsky, one of her collaborators, said.

To coincide with the album’s release, Lafourcade débuted another project: a thirteen-episode TV series, “Mi Mundo Privado,” showing her life around Mexico City as she worked in the studio. While filming the show, she got to know a tall, gentle Venezuelan working as a producer on the project—López Fonseca. The two were soon in a serious romantic relationship. I asked Fonseca recently if, while working on the show, he’d tried to engineer some drama for it. “I think the fact that I didn’t do that is why she liked me,” López said, chuckling. For years, the couple diligently endeavored to keep their relationship out of the press; even the Mexican gossip blogs did not know who Lafourcade was dating.

When “Mujer Divina” came out, her audience rewarded her risks. The album was a commercial hit, and it won her another Latin Grammy. Soon, though, Lafourcade fell into a bout of depression. In travelling deep into Lara’s songbook, she had become lost—she didn’t have a sense of her own music anymore. Taking time away from Mexico, she swam off the coast of Cuba and hiked into the mountains of Peru. As she began to get out of the funk, she visited the home of Leonel García, a Mexican singer and composer. She told him that she wanted to write a song that was properly Mexican—but not a caricature, not a ham-fisted mariachi. García’s parents were from Tamaulipas, a state just to the north of Veracruz, and he pulled out something from his childhood: huapango, a deep-rooted folk genre from Mexico’s east coast, in the homeland of the Huasteca people. Huapango is built around a 6/8 time signature, and García began strumming a 6/8 riff on his guitar. Lafourcade was entranced, and García told her to start singing. She sang about mountains and rivers, jungles and cane fields, plant spines and sacred smoke. The song became “Hasta la raíz.”

I was shocked when Lafourcade told me, over drinks soon after we left the ranch, that she hadn’t been thinking of Veracruz when she wrote the song. By that time, I had hiked in the mountains and swum in the river in Coatepec. I had seen a curandero, a folk healer, smudge a woman with sacred smoke. I asked Lafourcade if, when García had played the huapango riff, it might have moved her because it evoked Veracruz. “That’s it,” she said, nodding. “I think that that is the magic inside of making these projects—it is like raising the hand and saying, ‘Hey, I like it this way.’ ” Driving through Xalapa in her Jeep, she told me that, before she returned to Veracruz, she had wanted to be an “international artist.” Things changed when she created “Mujer Divina.” “That wasn’t a goal anymore for me. I think I started to fall in love with Mexico,” she said. She navigated us onto the highway, and we made our way back south, to the house she’d had built in a forest outside of Coatepec.

To get to Lafourcade’s home, we turned down a rough dirt road that plunged into a forest and brought us to a gated house with a large garden—a modernist creation surrounded by dense trees. While filming “Mi Mundo Privado,” she had brought López, along with the camera crew, to see the land. In the following years, as the two became more serious, they began working with an architect to design a home of wood, glass, and volcanic stone. “We wanted the feeling of this house to be a life hundida entre árboles”—submerged in the trees, she explained.

During this time, Lafourcade and López were living together in Mexico City, and they spent weekends in Coatepec, camping in the unfinished home. Even when it was completed, they continued thinking of it as a sort of artist retreat. Then, in 2019, Lafourcade announced that she would move to Coatepec full time. “In my mind, I was, like, I need that to be my house. I live there, I work there, and I do everything from that place,” she said. The following year, global calamity hit. López fled Mexico City for Coatepec, where the pandemic still felt like something on the news. The two went to speakeasies, where soneros and jazz musicians from the universities of Xalapa played underground shows. (She told me that she felt guilty at times for breaking quarantine.) One day, when she and López were in their garden, he turned to look at her. “I could live here,” he said. She chose her next words carefully. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Estoy 100 por ciento,” he said. He and Lafourcade were married in Peru in 2021, but they kept their relationship secret from the press until recently. When I visited, in the spring, the couple looked radiantly happy. At the time, neither of them knew that the singer was pregnant with their first child; the baby was born at the end of November.

The years that Lafourcade and López spent working on their home in Coatepec gave the singer an excuse to visit Veracruz often. She released two linked albums, “Musas Volume 1” and “Musas Volume 2,” in 2017 and 2018, creating what she called “an homage to Latin American folklore.” She reinterpreted a broad swath of the Mexican canon, putting her touch on boleros by artists such as María Grever, one of the country’s most internationally renowned composers. After fleeing to New York City during the Mexican Revolution, Grever gained her fame writing jazz-age hits like Dinah Washington’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes,” but she also worked to introduce Americans to traditional Mexican music. “There is such a cultural richness in Mexican music, its Hispanic and Indigenous origins and how they mix,” Grever once said. As part of the album, Lafourcade tried her hand at writing her own son jarocho songs. “Tú sí sabes quererme,” a charging love song, remains one of Lafourcade’s most popular—and probably best—tracks. At the beginning, a jarana player counts out the son jarocho metre. Later, the chorus becomes a call-and-response: “You know to love me / the way I like to be loved,” she and her band sing.

By the time Lafourcade released “Musas,” son jarocho had become one of her obsessions. In 2017, Ramón Guitérrez, one of the most prominent jarana players in Veracruz, had invited her to a huge son jarocho festival at a nature reserve called Luna Negra, or “black moon,” on a tiny river island called Tacamichapan. This was a more rough-and-tumble part of Veracruz, and Lafourcade felt nervous about going by herself, but Gutiérrez gave her the address of a gas station where they could meet. It was a twelve-hour drive down the coast, on rural roads, and, as she got closer to Jaltipan, she began to see dozens of young musicians on the side of the road, holding their instruments, with thumbs out. Small wooden barges carried Lafourcade and the other musicians out to the island, and, on the boats, they played their instruments and sang son jarocho. She told me that she felt her perspective of her life widen. “I think that helps to see these kinds of different universes happening at the same time as mine,” she said.

At her house, we sat down at a table in her garden for lunch with López. As he spooned salsa on a tetela, a cheese-filled tortilla triangle, López told me that he and Lafourcade had spent the past few years travelling through villages in the state, exploring different traditions. In the countryside, son jaracho is played in large gatherings called fandangos, in which the village constructs a tarima, a large wooden stage, and the entire crowd gathers around as dancers stomp the rhythm of the music. López told me he’d learned that, in some fandangos, only women dance to the sones; in others, men and women dance together. Some villages arranged the tarima to the cardinal directions. “They take it very seriously,” López told me. “If you call for a fandango, that means there’s going to be food, there’s going to be drink—people are going to show up from far away, because everyone answers the fandango call.”

After lunch, Lafourcade led me through the house to a patio made of volcanic stone, which led to a building with tall, airy ceilings: her home studio. Inside, an engineer was at work mastering the sound on the music videos for “Cancionera,” her latest album. “Cancionera” is a concept-based project; Lafourcade explained that she envisaged it as the work of an alter ego, the cancionera, the songstress—the mysterious part of her personality where her music comes from. During our time together, Lafourcade often described her ideal of songwriting as a sort of flow state where music emerges like water out of a spring. “Cancionera, don’t stop surprising me / you who can whisper verses to time,” she sings on the title track. But the album also suggests how fruitful her study of folk traditions has been: after the first songs, “Cancionera” proceeds as a series of collaborations with up-and-coming Spanish-language artists, including Los Hermanos Gutiérrez (two Ecuadorian Swiss brothers who play Western guitars in the style of Ry Cooder or Ennio Morricone) and Israel Fernández (a Romani flamenco singer from Spain). I talked to several of the collaborators, who spoke adoringly about Lafourcade, remarking on how interested she was in playing with their own sound and influences; she also had involved them in an impressive promotional stunt. The album was recorded, on physical tape, in a single take with cameras rolling, as Lafourcade and the other artists changed outfits and recorded an album-length music video.

“Cancionera” was nominated for eight Latin Grammys this September, and, as Lafourcade spoke to the engineer, I looked at a bookshelf of Grammys built into one of the walls, over a small shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe. I counted eleven of her eighteen Latin Grammys—the most held by any female artist (Shakira has fifteen, and Lafourcade won two more just a few months after I visited). On the shelf below these, I saw four more Grammys in a different color. “Those are my gringo Grammys,” Lafourcade said from the producer’s booth, walking over to where I was standing. “You can pick them up if you want.” Moving around the walls of the studio, she showed me more of her keepsakes: a gourd played in Indigenous Oaxacan music, her jarana. A donkey jaw hung next to a wooden replica. “That’s one normal quejido and a vegan quejido,” she said, picking up the wooden version and shaking it.

Before I met Lafourcade, I had expected her to describe her turn toward Mexican tradition as a reclamation of identity: as I heard her tell the audience at a concert in New Jersey this summer, “I completely love being Mexican.” But, the first time we spoke over the phone, she told me that she thinks she might have found the same passion that she found for Mexican music in any number of world traditions—flamenco, jazz, Afrobeat. “I’m looking for solidity,” she said.

As the sun set on Veracruz, Lafourcade brought me up a staircase to the roof of her studio. Cool air had begun to sink down from the white-capped peak of Cofre de Perote. Her house is built on a hill and, below us, I could see fields of cane glowing in the orange light. As I turned east, I could make out the smokestack of a large sugar mill. “That’s an ugly thing,” Lafourcade said. “It is so important, it’s such a deep part of Veracruz. But it has taken so much nature and—oh, look! Look at the bird.” About twenty feet below us, a toucan flew among the branches. I asked her if she could tell me the names of the trees. She nodded seriously, and pointed out banana trees, sandalwood, kapok, and bougainvillea. “We also have palo mulatto—a lot of palo mulatto,” she said. “If you take a branch of palo mulatto, and you put it in the earth, it grows,” she told me. “It’s a beautiful thing.” ♦

One year ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, made a bold prediction: “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.” A couple of weeks later, the company’s chief product officer, Kevin Weil, said at the World Economic Forum conference at Davos in January, “I think 2025 is the year that we go from ChatGPT being this super smart thing . . . to ChatGPT doing things in the real world for you.” He gave examples of artificial intelligence filling out online forms and booking restaurant reservations. He later promised, “We’re going to be able to do that, no question.” (OpenAI has a corporate partnership with Condé Nast, the owner of The New Yorker.)

This was no small boast. Chatbots can respond directly to a text-based prompt—by answering a question, say, or writing a rough draft of an e-mail. But an agent, in theory, would be able to navigate the digital world on its own, and complete tasks that require multiple steps and the use of other software, such as web browsers. Consider everything that goes into making a hotel reservation: deciding on the right nights, filtering based on one’s preferences, reading reviews, searching various websites to compare rates and amenities. An agent could conceivably automate all of these activities. The implications of such a technology would be immense. Chatbots are convenient for human employees to use; effective A.I. agents might replace the employees altogether. The C.E.O. of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, who has claimed that half the work at his company is done by A.I., predicted that agents will help unleash a “digital labor revolution,” worth trillions of dollars.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

2025 was heralded as the Year of the A.I. Agent in part because, by the end of 2024, these tools had become undeniably adept at computer programming. A demo of OpenAI’s Codex agent, from May, showed a user asking the tool to modify his personal website. “Add another tab next to investment/tools that is called ‘food I like.’ In the doc put—tacos,” the user wrote. The chatbot quickly carried out a sequence of interconnected actions: it reviewed the files in the website’s directory, examined the contents of a promising file, then used a search command to find the right location to insert a new line of code. After the agent learned how the site was structured, it used this information to successfully add a new page that featured tacos. As a computer scientist myself, I had to admit that Codex was tackling the task more or less as I would. Silicon Valley grew convinced that other difficult tasks would soon be conquered.

As 2025 winds down, however, the era of general-purpose A.I. agents has failed to emerge. This fall, Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI, who left the company and started an A.I.-education project, described agents as “cognitively lacking” and said, “It’s just not working.” Gary Marcus, a longtime critic of tech-industry hype, recently wrote on his Substack that “AI Agents have, so far, mostly been a dud.” This gap between prediction and reality matters. Fluent chatbots and reality-bending video generators are impressive, but they cannot, on their own, usher in a world in which machines take over many of our activities. If the major A.I. companies cannot deliver broadly useful agents, then they may be unable to deliver on their promises of an A.I.-powered future.

The term “A.I. agents” evokes ideas of supercharged new technology reminiscent of “The Matrix” or “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning.” In truth, agents are not some kind of customized digital brain; instead, they are powered by the same type of large language model that chatbots use. When you ask an agent to tackle a chore, a control program—a straightforward application that coördinates the agent’s actions—turns your request into a prompt for an L.L.M. Here’s what I want to accomplish, here are the tools available, what should I do first? The control program then attempts any actions that the language model suggests, tells it about the outcome, and asks, Now what should I do? This loop continues until the L.L.M. deems the task complete.

This setup turns out to excel at automating software development. Most of the actions required to create or modify a computer program can be implemented by entering a limited set of commands into a text-based terminal. These commands tell a computer to navigate a file system, add or update text in source files, and, if needed, compile human-readable code into machine-readable bits. This is an ideal setting for L.L.M.s. “The terminal interface is text-based, and that is the domain that language models are based on,” Alex Shaw, the co-creator of Terminal-Bench, a popular tool used to evaluate coding agents, told me.

More generalized assistants, of the sort envisioned by Altman, would require agents to leave the comfortable constraints of the terminal. Since most of us complete computer tasks by pointing and clicking, an A.I. that can “join the workforce” probably needs to know how to use a mouse—a surprisingly difficult goal. The Times recently reported on a string of new startups that have been building “shadow sites”—replicas of popular webpages, like those of United Airlines and Gmail, on which A.I. can analyze how humans use a cursor. In July, OpenAI released ChatGPT Agent, an early version of a bot that can use a web browser to complete tasks, but one review noted that “even simple actions like clicking, selecting elements, and searching can take the agent several seconds—or even minutes.” At one point, the tool got stuck for nearly a quarter of an hour trying to select a price from a real-estate site’s drop-down menu.

There’s another option to improve the capability of agents: make existing tools easier for the A.I. to master. One open-source effort aims to develop what’s known as Model Context Protocol, a standardized interface that allows agents to access software using text-based requests. Another is the Agent2Agent protocol, launched by Google last spring, which proposes a world in which agents interact directly with each other. My personal A.I. doesn’t have to use a hotel-reservation site if it can instead ask a dedicated A.I.—perhaps trained by the hotel company itself—to navigate the site on its behalf. Of course, it will take time to rebuild the infrastructure of the internet with bots in mind. (For years, developers have actively tried to prevent bots from messing around with websites.) And even if technologists can complete this project, or successfully master the mouse, they will face another challenge: the weaknesses of the L.L.M.s that underlie their agents’ decisions.

In a video that announced the début of ChatGPT Agent, Altman and a group of OpenAI engineers demoed several of its features. At one point, it generated a map, supposedly displaying an itinerary for visiting all thirty Major League Baseball stadiums in North America. Curiously, it included a stop in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. One could dismiss this flub as an outlier, but for Marcus, the Silicon Valley critic, this type of mistake underscores a more fundamental issue. He told me that L.L.M.s lack sufficient understanding of “how things work in the world” to reliably tackle open-ended tasks. Even in straightforward scenarios, such as planning a trip, he said, “you still have to reason about time, and you still have to reason about location”—basic human abilities that language models struggle with. “They’re building clumsy tools on top of clumsy tools,” he said.

Other commentators warn that agents will amplify errors. As chatbot users quickly learn, L.L.M.s have a tendency to make things up; one popular benchmark reveals that various versions of GPT-5, OpenAI’s cutting-edge model, have a hallucination rate of around ten per cent. For an agent tackling a multi-step task, these semi-regular lapses might prove catastrophic: it only takes one misstep for the entire effort to veer off track. “Don’t get too excited about AI agents yet,” a Business Insider headline warned in the spring. “They make a lot of mistakes.”

To better understand how an L.L.M. brain could go astray, I asked ChatGPT to walk through the plan it would follow if it were powering a hotel-booking agent. It described a sequence of eighteen steps and sub-steps: selecting the booking website, applying filters to the search results, entering credit-card information, sending me a summary of the reservation, and so on. I was impressed by how thoroughly the model could break down the activity. (Until you see them listed out, it’s easy to underestimate just how many small actions go into such a common task.) But I could also see places where our hypothetical agent might fall off track.

Sub-step 4.4, for example, has the agent rank rooms using a formula: α*(location score) + β*(rating score) − γ*(price penalty) + δ*(loyalty bonus). This is the right type of thing to do in this situation, but the L.L.M. left the details worrisomely underspecified. How would it calculate these penalty and bonus values, and how would it select the weights (represented by Greek symbols) to balance them? Humans would presumably hand-tune such details using trial-and-error and common sense, but who knows what an L.L.M. might do on its own. And little mistakes will matter: overemphasize something like the price penalty and you might end up in one of the seediest hotels in the city.

A few weeks ago, Altman announced in an internal memo that the development of A.I. agents was one project, among others, that OpenAI would deëemphasize, because it wanted to focus on improving its core chatbot product. This time last year, leaders like Altman were making it sound like we’d raced over a technological cliff, and that we were tumbling chaotically toward an automated workforce. Such breathlessness now seems rash. Lately, in an effort to calibrate my expectations about artificial intelligence, I’ve been thinking about a podcast interview with Karpathy, the OpenAI co-founder, from October. Dwarkesh Patel, the interviewer, asked him why the Year of the Agent had failed to materialize. “I feel like there’s some overpredictions going on in the industry,” Karpathy replied. “In my mind, this is really a lot more accurately described as the Decade of the Agent.” ♦

For the longest time, I kept myself from joining TikTok. Social media, I figured, was already kind of a problem for me. I was heavily hooked on Instagram, reaching for my phone and clicking into the app as soon as I woke up in the morning, and then continuing to scroll my feed and swipe through stories and check my D.M.s many times through the day in a kind of fugue state, even though, rationally, I knew that seeing everyone else’s seemingly perfect, fulfilled, and happy lives often made me feel like shit about myself. X, too, was something of an issue. As a longtime tweeter, I kept doggedly logging into the app even after Elon Musk bought it, despite its proliferation of racist, pornographic, and conspiratorial posts. So strong was the hold that these platforms exerted on my time and habits that the only way for me to refrain from using them was to fully deactivate them, which I’d occasionally resort to doing. (If I simply deleted the apps from my phone, I would find myself—shamefacedly, self-loathingly—downloading them again almost immediately.) My brain, dependent on the instant gratification of likes and replies, reliant on the numbing comfort of scrolling and clicking, and terrified of the prospect of being alone with its own thoughts, was plenty full of poison without another social-media platform being added to the mix.

My trepidation about TikTok, it seemed, had some grounding in reality. Certainly, in the past several years, the app has been blamed for any number of contemporary social ills. It’s been variously associated with phone addiction, disinformation, and zombie-like hyper-superficiality. (In a recent episode of the new HBO comedy “I Love L.A.,” the real-life TikTok influencer Quenlin Blackwell spoofs herself as a shallow content creator obsessed with maximizing her empty TikTok fame.) The app, with its busy, nonsensical, and meme-heavy for-you feed, often soundtracked with harebrained audio effects and cartoonishly sped-up music snippets or narration, seems especially geared toward attracting young people, which has sparked worry about the platform’s potential negative impact on kids’ mental health. “When I started this project, one girl told me, half of my friends have an eating disorder from TikTok and the other half are lying,” the documentarian Lauren Greenfield said, when I spoke with her last year about “Social Studies,” her recent series about teens and social media.

Still, I knew that TikTok’s utter centrality to contemporary American life could not be denied. The number of TikTok users in the U.S., at last official count, was a mind-boggling hundred and seventy million, and TikTok Shop, the in-app online marketplace that launched in the States in the fall of 2023, has been growing in this country at a dizzying clip, already rivalling long-established online-commerce companies like Etsy and eBay. (Between January and October of this year, marketplace sales reached ten billion dollars in the States, compared with just half that sum during the same period in 2024—and this despite Donald Trump’s tariffs.) As a critic, I, too, realized that TikTok was a breeding ground not just for memes and trends that animate popular culture, like the senseless if oddly amusing “six seven” or the frankly disgusting Dubai chocolate, but also for celebrities who go on to surpass the confines of the platform. (Addison Rae, for instance, who rose to prominence, as a teen, performing in dance videos on the app, and then turned to a pop-singing career, was recently nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist and selected as the Guardian’s artist of the year.) In short, I began to feel that I owed it to myself, my readers, and maybe even my nation, to take the plunge into the choppy waters of TikTok. And when the opportunity arose to attend the first-ever TikTok Awards ceremony, in Hollywood, I knew that the time was now.

To have some reinforcement on my maiden voyage, I invited my friend Hannah to join me. Though she’s an adult and even a parent, Hannah, whom you might know as a food critic for this publication, surprised me by confessing that she was “genuinely a huge fan” of TikTok, though she hastened to provide a caveat. “I think it’s awful and a scourge on the earth,” she said, adding that she’s lost endless precious hours to mindless scrolling on the app, and that she occasionally must disable it when she begins to hear its most popular sound clips echoing in her head, “A Beautiful Mind”-style. Still, she explained, she appreciates TikTok for the unfamiliar corners of human experience that it reveals to her. Unlike Instagram, which leads her to compare and despair with people she knows, TikTok “doesn’t make me hate myself,” she told me, brightly. She watches court footage from murder cases, or “get ready with me” videos made by moms of eight in the Midwest, or odd challenges like “the candy salad trauma dump,” in which people name a trauma they’ve experienced as they chuck Sour Patch Kids or Skittles into a bowl. “It’s all weird strangers who fascinate me,” she said.

A couple of days before the ceremony, I created a TikTok account in preparation and began to scroll it trepidatiously. Hannah had praised the platform’s algorithm as extremely sensitive to her preferences (“I find that it really takes care of me,” she told me), but I knew that it would take time for the app to recognize my innermost needs, whatever those even were. (Cats? Plastic surgery before-and-afters? Celebrity-gossip blind items?) And so what I got was a little of everything: a video sharing tips on how to “level up your femininity” (“wear perfume everywhere”; “treat your hair like gold”); a prank in which a guy tries to direct confused drivers to a “gay parking lot”; a recording of a 911 call reporting a double murder; a treacly “Christmastime in New York” video that looked like, and in fact was (I think?), A.I. I also kept in mind the words of my teen-age daughter, who gave me some begrudging but useful advice before I got on the plane to Los Angeles. “On Instagram, some people might still want to connect with people they know,” she said. “On TikTok, everyone is out for themselves, creating content.” In other words, I was not here to make friends.

I shouldn’t have worried. Heading into the Palladium, the venue on Sunset Boulevard where the event was taking place, we saw many of the nominees and some of the event’s presenters congregating near the press pit, and I realized that I was truly a stranger in a strange land. Who the hell were these people? The vibe felt a bit like that of a small-town prom: revellers were hobnobbing in sequinned evening wear, inventive jewelry, elaborately coiffed hairdos, and heavy makeup. Some—the class clowns?—were even in costume. A performer at the event named Mr. Fantasy (1.1 million followers), with a coal-black bobbed wig, Elton John sunglasses, and a modish pink suit, delivered Austin Powers-style sound bites in an exaggerated British accent on the step-and-repeat. (Later, I learned that he is rumored to be the alter ego of the “Riverdale” actor K. J. Apa.) Jools Lebron (2.3 million followers), a presenter known for her viral 2024 TikTok catchphrase “very demure, very mindful,” who was dressed in a low-cut sparkly gown, cooled herself off with a handheld fan; Chris Finck (1.8 million followers), a creator nominated for his skydiving videos, jumped up and down for the cameras, as if to take flight, while wearing his wingsuit gear.

This was, in other words, no Vanity Fair Oscars party. No one was going for quiet luxury or refined elegance; no one was trying to pretend that they hadn’t made a big effort, or that they weren’t incredibly excited to be there, or that they weren’t constantly capturing both themselves and everyone else around them on their phones, presumably for their TikToks feeds, creating a kind of snake-eating-its-own-tail situation. And, if there was something undeniably depressing about the frankness of this constant surveillance (not to mention the expectation that everything in the world could be converted into shareable content), it also felt weirdly refreshing. Wasn’t this just an honest, if amplified, reflection of what life in public was now like?

This sense crystallized for me as soon as the show began, and the audience was informed that an electrical issue in the venue had caused the screens onstage to blow out. This meant that the live ceremony, almost unbelievably, would proceed with audio only. The event had fourteen awards categories, among them Rising Star of the Year, for rookie TikTokers; the Okay Slay award, for beauty creators; and the I Was Today Years Old award, for education creators. Each time a presenter announced the nominees for a certain category, only the disembodied soundtrack of their TikTok clips would play, with no visuals. At first, I was surprised that the show would take place under these bare-bones circumstances, but then, Hannah pulled out her phone and showed me the TikTok live stream of the event, in which the clips were spliced in, intact. The electrical fiasco, in other words, didn’t matter that much. Or, rather, it mattered to the IRL experience, but that was marginal compared with the much more signal event taking place on everyone’s devices, where the heads of much of the audience were buried, anyway.

Still, I had to admit that there was something sweet and even life-affirming about the seams-showing nature of the whole thing. The TikTok creators I talked to, unlike traditional big-time celebrities, weren’t yet polished to a high sheen, or detached from everyday realities. It wasn’t that long ago that many of them were so-called nobodies from nowhere, average Joes and Jills from diverse backgrounds just trying to eke out a living, and now they seemed truly sincere in their belief in TikTok’s bounty, which had enabled them to provide for themselves and their families through brand deals and affiliate marketing, follower donations and paywalls, per-view rewards and off-platforms opportunities.

In the course of the evening, I heard the sentence “TikTok changed my life” repeated again and again. One creator, a young man named Santiago Albarrán, from Houston (3.3 million followers), told me that, thanks to his TikTok ascent, he’s been able to open a clothing line, establish a candy company for his family, and give back to the Hispanic community. When I approached Albarrán, he was filming his friend and fellow-creator Pablo Zolezzi (2.9 million followers), as he did a funky little dance on the Palladium’s deep-pink carpet. The two, who were both wearing sharp, handsome suits, made their name on TikTok by posting comedic bits, sometimes in collaboration with each other. (Zolezzi broke through with a video in which he made a funny hot-guy “Chad” face; in Albarrán’s first viral video, he wore a neon-colored wig and danced in a parking lot with a couple of friends.) “It’s ridiculous how much it’s put us on the map,” Zolezzi said. “We’ve been able to escape the nine-to-five.” He, too, has been given off-platform breaks through TikTok. He now owns a gourmet-cookie brand and has been able to invest in real estate. “All with TikTok, everything,” Albarrán said.

At a point in the country’s history in which the possibility of making a living wage, much less achieving the American Dream, seems ever dimmer, TikTok might appear to be a potential solution—an online frontier beckoning to those who are daring and persistent enough to conquer it. And yet, as Adorno and Horkheimer once reminded us, “fortune will not smile on all,” and, in any case, even those who have tasted the fruits of this dream factory can never stop grinding. One of the nominees for the “TikTok LIVE Creator of the Year” award, the singer Jourdan Blue (835,000 followers), told me that his performances, which he live-streams on the app, have enabled him not just to provide for himself but also to achieve professional goals like funding a music video though fan donations. (Followers can send contributions to streamers via gift emojis; TikTok takes a cut of the proceeds.) I wondered how many people watched his lives. “Right now, I have about nine hundred viewers,” he responded. A live stream was, in fact, taking place as we spoke. “All of these are pennies,” he said. He pointed at this phone, to show me the gift emoji a follower had just sent him. “Here’s a rose, because I like you.” ♦

Few harbingers are more promising than the Swedish singer and producer Robyn. A sonic palate cleanser, she always seems to appear when we need her most. Her 1995 début, “Robyn Is Here,” signalled an alt-pop future. In 2005, her self-titled album bristled with a freedom from major-label concerns. 2010 brought the “Body Talk” era and its euphoric statement of purpose; she was a star dancing on her own. Nearly a decade passed before she reëmerged with her post-breakup opus “Honey,” in 2018. The singer, who officially returned from a seven-year hiatus last month with a new single, “Dopamine,” now grants a chance to revel in her latest comeback at Brooklyn Paramount, for a New Year’s Eve show dubbed “Robyn & Friends.”

Robyn plays Brooklyn Paramount on New Year’s Eve.Photograph by Nicole Busch

As the clock strikes midnight on 2025, d.j.s across the city will help patrons usher in the coming year. Two shows stand out in a sea of turntablists and selectors. The Nowadays hosts Aurora Halal and Avalon Emerson—the former a creator of Brooklyn’s long-running party series “Mutual Dreaming,” and the latter a mixmaster and producer whose 2023 album, “& the Charm,” expanded her electronic music into a hazy, whimsical pop expanse—go on at midnight and play until six. There’s also the Palestinian techno artist Sama’ Abdulhadi, a trailblazer for her scene, who broke through in Beirut and has since turned mixing into a kind of activism. In a Bushwick warehouse at 99 Scott Ave., Abdulhadi continues an essential outreach program.

There are alternatives to ringing in the New Year on the dance floor, for those seeking them. Since 2024, the Bronx rapper and producer Cash Cobain has defined the sound of sample drill, a New York offshoot of the Chicago-born hip-hop subgenre. His début album, “Play Cash Cobain,” was released in August last year, and his profile has been boosted significantly this year by collaborations with Drake, Justin Bieber, and Cardi B—and sample drill has gone national. Cobain embraces his newfound prominence at Panda Harlem. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the iconic jam band Phish, an improvisational hydra that has made a four-decade career out of free forms like psychedelic rock and jazz fusion. The band, formed in 1983, released their sixteenth LP last year, but the group places greater emphasis on the live experience, which samples that discography as if it is a singular, ever-evolving organism, and has drawn a cult following. Those looking to join the jam can find the band squatting in Madison Square Garden from Dec. 28 until the ball drops.—Sheldon Pearce

Bad Bunny, “BAILE INoLVIDABLE”

Bad Bunny’s unforgettable “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” hooked me from its first seconds—those dreamy, moody, synthy minor chords and Bunny’s reflective crooning cast a spell. Soon the song flips into a more traditional salsa, with perhaps my favorite lyric of the year: “Tú me enseñaste a querer; me enseñaste a bailar”—You taught me to want; you taught me to dance.

Haim, “All over me”

I am an unrepentant fan of Haim—those sisters just know what sounds good. I love the song “All over me,” off the wistful album “I quit.” It’s jangly, drum-heavy, full of yearning and earnest temerity—a sad-sounding song about running headlong into falsely happy carnal entanglement.

Dijon, “my man”

I first heard “my man,” by the up-and-coming R. & B. experimentalist Dijon, on his revelatory album “Baby,” in August, while spending a week in a small hotel in upstate New York. The song, which is haunting, downbeat, and made up of all kinds of noise—shattering synths and vérité birdsong—fit the environment so well that I still can’t hear it without seeing the small waterfall rushing outside my window.

Summer Walker, “Go Girl”

You know what I like? Hearing people talk a whole bunch of confident shit over good beats. If you like this, too, you will love the song “Go Girl,” by Summer Walker, featuring Latto and Doja Cat. There’s a line about slipping into a salt bath, on account of being very rich!

Summer Walker.Photograph by Scott Legato / Getty

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Alexi Pappas wants us to take things less personally
• Is Gen X actually the greatest generation?
• The dads are raising their game